Recent weeks have been exciting for a relatively new kind of currency speculator. In just three weeks, the total value of a unique new digital currency called Bitcoin has jumped four times, to over $40 million.
There's some interesting discussion about Bitcoin on this Quora question: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-idea" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-id...</a>
Good explanation. It'll be interesting to see what happens if someone ever attempts to run a major exchange within the US. My money says they'll be labeled a terrorist.
The question is, which will be the more stable currency 5 or 10 years from now, BitCoin or the US Dollar?<p>See The Future of Money: <a href="http://pragmaticpoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/2010/03/future-of-money.html" rel="nofollow">http://pragmaticpoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/2010/03/future...</a>
To me, Bitcoin just seems like a form of electronic gold. Limited supply; no significant intrinsic value; no backing government or other body. Conversion to real currency is commonplace but not exactly convenient.<p>Is this way of looking at it a poor predictor for the way it will behave in the market?
question: Is the Bitcoin approach to distributed, secure transactions useful (and is it novel?) without the currency generation component? Are they potentially separable?