Quote from: snookie on February 05, 2014, 04:22:58 PM

This is very interesting. Is there any way to control this

Not that I know of but why would anyone want to ? Markets will decide the future of crytocurrencies.

If you think about it though, we can more or less see how it's going to develop by looking at the past and the history of money / fiat currencies.

What I see evolving is a model where certain crypto's (namely bitcoin and maybe 1 or maximum 2 others) act as "reserve currencies". The dollar played this role while it was linked to the value of gold as part of the Bretton Woods system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

In the bretton woods system, there were a finite amount of dollars because their printing was limited by the gold reserves (prior to 1970/71). Meanwhile,there was an infinite amount of foreign currency produced by other nations which would all bob up and down in value against the dollar which basically served as a proxy for gold.

In the cryptocurrency economy, currencies will no doubt similarly split off into 2 types - reserve and "other". Bitcoin being the "reserve" (I actually see Peercoin as a strong candidate for a reserve but not really Litecoin). As with the Bretton-Woods Dollar, there is a finite amount of bitcoin but a potentially "infinite" amount of alts. Alts will provide the liquidity to the economy and Bitcoin will provide the reserve value against which the value of all alts are measured. You can see this happening already on the exchanges. The non-fiat markets are all priced against BTC with some also using LTC or XPM as a reserve. That shows you straight away the status that XPM has - it's considered a 'reserve' currency rather than a floating one by some exchanges.

That doesn't mean that some alts won't have a high trading value from time to time and will be worth investing in. As I see it, Bitcoin probably won't even be the most popular medium of exchange for day to day purchasing. But the reserve "cryptos" will have a 'save haven' status that non of the others have - using current language, there will be the crypto reserves and there will be the 'pump and dumps'. You'll just have to know when to pump and when to dump !

P.S. Here's the magic moment when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard because they needed a "few more" of them to be able to pay for the pesky Vietnam war. This moment is probably the single most pivotal event that took the world economy to where it is today...the brink of outright collapse and currency debasement. Read between the lines the "we're about to scam you but it'll be alright" sales talk...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o

Before I finish, here's the end result. Check out this graph of dollar money supply (in particular the near 90 angle at 2009) during the last 3 years of QE and decide for yourself where this is all going to end...

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE/