IN REALITY, the only thing that can give Bitcoin or any other type of
currency value is its acceptance by the people who are willing to accept
them. The amount and quality of the goods and services that are purchasable
with the currency is what counts.
This should not be confused with the “price” of Bitcoin, which is the
number of, say, US dollars or euros that people are willing to swap for a
Bitcoin.
The Population of the Bitcoin Economy
The estimated amount of Bitcoin users in early 2013 is about one million
people. This may sound very small in terms of a world population of over
seven billion, but it is helpful to remember that the population of Bitcoin
users started in 2009 with a population of one.
Furthermore, the population of Bitcoin users is by definition made up of
people who at least have access to the Internet and are therefore within the
wealthiest third of the global population.
As with any currency, the Bitcoin community can be divided into three
different categories — “producers,” “consumers,” and “speculators.” The
producers provide goods and services because they wish to earn Bitcoins.
Consumers buy Bitcoins so that they can purchase goods with them more
efficiently. Speculators buy Bitcoins in the hope that they appreciate in either
price or value. In truth, just like any other monetary system, a great deal of
the population falls into all three categories.
Financial Services
There are now dozens of websites offering a range of financial speculative
services. These include five different stock markets for digital-currency
companies, forex trading platforms as well as options- and futures- trading
brokerages. Whether this is legal or not in any given host nation remains to
be seen. It does require some thinking about whether Bitcoin can be
considered “money.” This brings us to the question of the creation of Bitcoin
at source.
