Do Bitcoins make the world go round? On the dynamics of competing crypto-currencies

Understand

Bitcoins have emerged as a possible competitor to usual currencies, but other crypto-currencies have likewise appeared as competitors to the Bitcoin currency.

• The expanding market of crypto-currencies now involves capital equivalent to $10^{10}$ US Dollars, providing academia with an unusual opportunity to study the emergence of value.
• Here we show that the Bitcoin currency in itself is not special, but may rather be understood as the contemporary dominating crypto-currency that may well be replaced by other currencies.
• We suggest that perception of value in a social system is generated by a voter-like dynamics, where fashions form and disperse even in the case where information is only exchanged on a pairwise basis between agents.