> the supply of currency (...) is controlled by a small handful of early adopters who therefore control the price. Careful now, this is a big simplification.

> the supply of currency (...) is controlled by a small handful of early adopters who therefore control the price. Careful now, this is a big simplification. The supply is only partly controlled by the current adopters. Each adopter is free to throw more and better silicon & software onto the computations, to get better chances of finding a new hash. However, the overall pace is moderated by the so-called `difficulty factor', shared by all peers. Which is adjusted periodically so the generation of subsequent hashes doesn't progress too fast -- where `fast or too fast' is about building community of users. Current difficulty factor, and other stats, available near real-time courtesy of http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ EDIT: from the bitcoin wiki: > The network tries to create 6 blocks per hour. Every 2016 blocks (about two weeks), all Bitcoin clients compare the actual number created with this goal and modify the target by the percentage that it varied. This increases (or decreases) the difficulty of generating blocks. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block