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发帖数: 3337 | 1 http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/112854/curre
The Currency That's Up 200,000 Percent
Bitcoins are the top-performing money in the world — but what are they?
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The best performing currency of the past year isn't Brazil's real, up 15%
versus the U.S. dollar, or Australia's dollar, up 27%. It's the Bitcoin. A
year ago one was worth half a penny. Thursday morning it hit $10.50. That's
a gain of more than 200,000%.
What's a Bitcoin? It's a peer-to-peer system of electronic money that allows
payments to be sent directly between two parties without the need for a
financial institution. It's related to Bit Torrent, a system for sharing
large files like movies, but in this case the "movie" is a file with the
currency's entire transaction history. And because users themselves all
share that history, "it's more secure than even bank transactions," says
Donald Norman, a spokesman for the Bitcoin Consultancy, which is seeking to
gain wider acceptance for the currency.
As befitting a virtual currency, no one is quite sure who created the
Bitcoin. A white paper and software turned up three years ago listing
Satoshi Nakamoto as the author. That's presumed to be a pseudonym. All that'
s known about Nakamoto, based on his paper and message board comments, is
that he's fluent in English and has a deep understanding of Internet
security.
Dotcom crash veterans might recall failed currencies like Flooz and Beenz,
but those were mere means of online payment. Bitcoin is an entire monetary
system. It doesn't require a Treasury Department, because there are no bills
or coins to mint. It doesn't need a Federal Reserve to create money. An
algorithm does that at a rate that slows by half every four years. There are
about six million Bitcoins today. The number will approach 21 million
beginning in the 2030s but never exceed it.
The finite supply of Bitcoins might help explain the frantic demand for them
. Dollars and euros are created at will by central bankers. Some economists
see that as useful for smoothing out wild swings in the economy — making
money more plentiful when consumers are hurting and scarcer when they're
flush. Skeptics, and there are many, worry that the ability to create money
from nothing will be abused by governments that overspend, resulting in
gradual debasing of the value of savings. That's why dollar bears cling to
gold, and why a few might now be scrambling for Bitcoins.
Users get Bitcoins in one of several ways. "Miners" set their computers to
work solving problems in exchange for coins. The more miners there are, the
more difficult the problems become, which keeps the rate of supply stable.
At recent exchange rates, high-end machines can produce $30 worth of
Bitcoins per day, but consume a vast amount of energy in doing so. Some
advanced miners have taken to cooling their machines with dry ice to improve
their results.
The other ways to get Bitcoins involve trading goods, services or cash. Mt.
Gox has emerged as the largest Bitcoin exchange, charging 0.65% per
transaction to match up buyers and sellers. More than $500,000 worth of the
coins changed hands in a recent 24-hour period. Traders can add funds to
their accounts using cash, checks, bank wires or Liberty Reserve, a private
online payment service.
Any fiat currency — dollars, euros, Bitcoins — gets its value from trust.
Dollars can't be cashed in for anything; rather, we accept them as payment
with the belief that others will accept them, too. That's another reason the
price of Bitcoins has rocketed over the past year. Two years ago, almost no
one accepted them for payment. Over the past year, a handful of early
adopters began trading services for them — mostly programmers offering
things like website design and hacking consultation. In recent months, a
handful of pioneers have begun selling real goods for the start-up money.
Four months ago David Forster, 29, convinced his parents Jim and Nancy,
owners of Green Hill Alpacas in Haydenville, Mass., to accept Bitcoins for
alpaca socks. Technically, the younger Forster buys the socks for dollars
and resells them for Bitcoins. "They said it sounded like a Ponzi scheme but
that as long as I wasn't risking their money for Internet coins it was fine
," he says.
Sock sales have risen to between 75 and 100 since the experiment began from
four dozen during all of last year and orders have come from as far as
Finland and Russia. More remarkable is what has happened to pricing. Forster
began charging 75 Bitcoins for each pair in February and has since had to
lower the price to 5 due to extreme appreciation in the currency's value. "I
wish I had kept all of them," says Forster, who traded his Bitcoins on the
way up for cash and web services.
More than a dozen sites now sell goods for Bitcoins, including T-shirts,
coffee and natural pet food. At least one, The Arms Locker, says it offers
firearms. Another, Silk Road, is a forum for people selling recreational
drugs. How can that be? Bitcoin transactions leave a record of times and
amounts, but not identities, and Silk Road can only be reached through an
identity-cloaking computer network called Tor. There's no way to determine
the identity of its administrators and since sellers only accept Bitcoins
for their wares, they can't be found, either (so long as packages are mailed
discretely).
That's one source of discomfort surrounding Bitcoins. Even a libertarian who
's comfortable with anonymous gun and drug sales would cringe at the thought
that, say, the child pornography trade has a new way to escape detection.
Amir Taaki, a U.K. citizen and project developer for Bitcoin.org, admits
that Bitcoins can be used for bad things but says the same is true of cash
and that Bitcoins have much potential for good. "Think of all of the people
sending money in third-world countries and getting ripped off by outrageous
transaction fees," he says. "Bitcoins are here to stay and the world will
benefit. The U.S. can ban it but it will still proliferate."
It's not clear what regulators think of Bitcoin. The Constitution gives
Congress the sole authority over U.S. money. In March, a North Carolina
resident was convicted of minting his own Liberty Dollars to reduce reliance
on and compete with the greenback. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
Bitcoins aren't U.S. currency, however, and Norman says the Bitcoin
Consultancy doesn't operate in the U.S. And as with file-sharing software,
Bitcoin operates as a peer-to-peer network, raising the question of how
regulators could stop it if they wanted to. The FBI didn't respond to
requests for comment. On a message board, one Bitcoin miner wrote that
agents visited his home. They weren't interested in currency, though. Huge
electricity usage led them to suspect a marijuana growing operation.
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