DailyDirt: Do You Trust Digital Currencies?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Global financial markets have shown that respectable currencies can be threatened by the actions of relatively small economies. The basis of modern money is trust, not the value of gold or of any particular physical goods. Perhaps digital currencies could provide some alternatives for small countries (who shall remain nameless, cough, Cyprus, cough, Luxembourg...), but there's still a problem of trust to resolve. It's not always easy to just switch to a new currency. Here are just a few forms of digital money that might be floating around.

• Amazon Coins are yet another virtual currency -- specifically for buying virtual goods on Amazon's Kindle tablet. One Amazon Coin is equal to the value of a US penny, and everyone will soon be collecting them, so get them before they're all gone.... [url]
• Flooz.com officially shut down in 2001, putting an end to its digital currency that was used on the internet as an early kind of electronic gift certificate. Thousands of people had bought Flooz (at an exchange rate of 1 USD to 1 Flooz), but the company had also sold ~$300,000 worth of Flooz via fraudulent credit card transactions, which ultimately doomed the company. [url]
• Bitcoins are still getting attention, even after some serious missteps, but the market for Bitcoins isn't quite trustworthy yet. If Bitcoins do succeed in gaining mainstream use, will there be a flood of digital currencies based on a variety of different cryptographic rules? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: amazon coins, bitcoin, currency, digital cash, flooz, money