Bitcoins have emerged as a possible competitor to usual currencies, but competing cryptocurrencies have likewise appeared to take on Bitcoin. The expanding market of cryptocurrencies now involves capital equivalent to 1010 US Dollars, providing academia with an unusual opportunity to study the emergence of value. In this paper, the authors show that the Bitcoin currency in itself is not special, but may rather be understood as the contemporary dominating cryptocurrency that may well be replaced by other currencies. They 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.

The model is at its core simplistic, re-iterating the basic fact that all competing cryptocurrencies are inherently interchangeable and well may be reshuffled by future contingencies. The model fails to give the same exponentas observed for the power law scaling of real cryptocurrencies, and instead predicts systematically broader distributions. Said differently, the contemporary dominance of Bitcoin is in fact less than one would typically expect of a voter- or Moran-like underlying social dynamics.

Overall, the authors’  consideration serves to emphasise competing cryptocurrencies as a good model-system for the study of human folly, including the history-dependent randomness in assigning what is valuable and what has no value. A consideration that should be at the heart of multiple aspects of social activity, social hierarchies, and thereby also be part of maintaining overall social order.