Quote from: jimbobway on February 10, 2011, 10:06:51 PM

Bitcoin is a P2P technology like Bittorrent. If companies want to control the currency then Bitcoin is not for them.

Yes, I agree, but we are talking about a currency here. The currency's value is not that it's decentralized but that it can buy you something.
Some time ago all money was decentralized as well - if you had gold and silver coins you didn't need any central authority to tell people what is the value of your money. The gold coin was worth as much as the gold it was made of, the same with silver. Then money was centralized -you have a piece of paper with a number on it and the government's job is to convince everyone that the piece of paper has a certain value, much greater than the paper itself. So, this is still money, even if the 'underlying architecture' has changed, and still people want to (or have to) use it.

But this diverts quite a lot from my original question which was: how new digital currencies will reduce the purchasing power of existing ones?
maybe if the cryptocurrency's purchasing power will equal the real cost of creating it it won't matter how many new currencies are created, their value will not drop below the cost of creating a new currency unit? Just like the real metal coin - it will never cost less than the metal its made of. (yeah, I think I got what moa was talking about)