Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity

IamTheRealMike writes "The BitCoin peer to peer currency briefly reached exchange parity with the US dollar today after a spike in demand for the coins pushed prices slightly above 1 USD:1 BTC. BitCoin was launched in early 2009, so in only two years this open source currency has gone from having no value at all to one with not only an open market of competing exchanges, but the ability to buy real goods and services like web hosting, gadgets, organic beauty products and even alpaca socks."

Comments

Obvious question

[skine]

Do alpacas really wear socks?

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

From the site,

The total eventual circulation will be 21 million bitcoins. There will never be more coins than that. The coins are entering circulation gradually, at a steady pace over many years, to nodes supporting the network in proportion to the CPU time they contribute. With the current total CPU power on the network, most CPUs will usually take months between successfully generating 50 BTC.

So basically, this is like "collector items", not currency. A very scare "resource", if you can call it that. You get 50 BTC after few months, meaning that basically you've just spent $50 in electricity to get your "free" money.

Anyway, this virtual "currency" is bad for so many reasons, it's not even funny. Fist, the purpose of currency is not to hoard it - it is to spend it for goods/services. Currency is IOU notes that devalue over time. It is not a hard asset, like coal or copper or shares of MegaAssInc. FIAT currency tends to be *backed* by something, like an economy, like USA or European Union or even China. What is this backed by?

Anyway, another fad "currency". Might as well collect "ISK in eveonline" or "gold nuggets in WoW" - same thing.

Re:I was thinking of calling it a con

[JesseMcDonald]

... this isn't really any different than what banks do with fractional reserve banking.

Aside, of course, from the complete lack of anything resembling deposits, loans, or reserves (fractional or otherwise). In other words, no real similarity at all. It's not a con or scam either, of course—merely a protocol for indirect exchange in which certain hard-to-find patterns of bits take the place of scarce physical commodities. As a virtual currency it has many of the attributes which make precious metals so eminently suitable as physical currencies: scarcity, durability, divisibility, and fungibility, to name a few. The protocol may not be perfect, but it is the best I've seen thus far. The limitations mainly relate to scalability and maintaining a consistent state between many decentralized peers—technical issues, not economic ones.

It works this way :

[unity100]

you join the network with your computer. the network is a cloud that lives on its own, without noone being able to control it. so, it doesnt have any central point of failure. it also awards you some amount of bitcoins for running the client, because you are contributing to the running of the system. but this is inversely proportional to the amount of computational power the cloud has at that moment - back when bitcoin was small, much more coins were awarded for joining clients. now, the network is nearing seti etc in computational power. it is impossible to generate even a single bitcoin over months with an ordinary computer now. and so on.

system assumes two things :

cost of electricity

computational power.

it is based on the computational power of the network. if the computational power increases, the system arranges bitcoins accordingly. so, even if you join with a huge server farm, you just up the computational power of the network, and the amount of coins you can earn from your participation decreases. hence, you cannot beat the network.

also, the cost of electricity is a factor. if you do the above, you will get hit by a huge cost in electricity.

only way to beat the system, is to be able to have zero cost for the electricity you spend, and then join it with mega server farms.

but, the system says that, at a point where zero cost for electricity is a practical reality anywhere on the planet, there will be no need for money, since cost of producing anything will approximate zero. (and that's right).

..........

the system is also anonymous. noone but you and the person you exchange with, know who sent them what. but, this knowledge is only in the form of awareness of a complex encrypted key existing on the other side - nothing else. it may have been done from china over a netbook, or a mobile device flying somewhere on atlantic ocean.

that is both good, and also a drawback - if you lose the encrypted keys you store on your hard drive, you lose the 'wallet' that contains your cash.

but thats no different in the real world either.