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The way any currency has value is that you can buy things with it. The value is basically proportional to the amount of trade that takes place with the currency, divided by the amount of the currency in existence.Bitcoin has a tightly controlled rate of creation (more people getting into it does not mean more bitcoins will be created), so the more people involved, the more valuable it gets. Once that gets as high as it's going to get, the 2009ers will cash out, making themselves rich, but causing a large drop in bitcoin value (due to the millions of "new" bitcoins entering circulation), which will very quickly turn into an outright crash (nobody wants to be stuck holding a currency that's rapidly dropping in value, so people will try to get out while they still can, causing a positive-feedback loop) - so everyone else is stuck holding now-worthless imaginary money.
Could someone please explain why this makes the coins of monetary value?
So it is more than just belief that soemone will give you something for that dollar that makes it worth something
Inflation happens when the symbolic money cannot be physically backed up. The US treasury maintains an enormous sum of gold used to back up the dollar. When the symbolic paper dollar is produced in mass quantities each dollar then represents a smaller portion of that gold, therefore decreasing its value.
yeah. Actually the thing that backs it up is confidence. By the way, how would the 2009'ers cashing out lead to a spiral of doom?
We should use ByteCoins since we measure things in bytes still.
Quote from: BrownyTCat on June 03, 2011, 09:04:10 amWe should use ByteCoins since we measure things in bytes still.I think they were just getting a generic computer term to use
By people caching in and therefore adding their bitcoins back into circulation, this is now increasing the amount of currency, but not increasing the amount of trade.