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

Abstract

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.