Bitcoin has become the currency that's hard to spend: Don Pittis

You'd have to be crazy to spend $82million for two pizzas.

But according to bitcoinlore,on May 22, 2010, LaszloHanyeczbecame the first person to buy real physical goods with the sparkling new cryptocurrencywhen he paid 10,000 bitcoins for two Domino's pizzas.

WhenHanyeczbought his pizzas, abitcoinwas worth a fraction of a cent. As bitcoin crashes through new highs this week a single bitcoinis worth just over $8,200 Cdn that would make the pizzascost $82 million.

If you're like most people, right now you're probably thinking about how rich you would be if only you had bought a few pizzas' worth of bitcoinsa mere seven years ago and held ontothem.

But while the cryptocurrencymay seem like a success, that crazy multiplication in the value of the bitcoinhas almost completely derailed its initial purpose. For all intents and purposes, a bitcoinhas become the currencythat's hard to spend.

In a wage economy, the purpose and value of money is twofold. One is as a store of value.In other words, if you do a day's work today you want to be able to save up the value of that work and spend it on weekend beer,a winter holiday or keepit for when you're old.

As a store of value, so far, bitcoinshave fulfilled their currency-like function in spades.

But the other essential value of money is as a measure of pricing and exchange. This is where the bitcoinhas fallen down.

The bitcoin and its virtual wallet was intended to replace currencies, but no one wants to be modern dayLaszloHanyecz. Even more important,trying to price your goods or services in bitcoinsis a fool's errand.

Stable pricing needed

The only way to do it would be to have a parallel running tally of the value of bitcoinin"fiat money" so despised by bitcoinenthusiasts.

Some arguethat cryptocurrencies are too fiat money, but the big advantage of loonies, or U.S. dollars or even gold is that they remain relatively stable compared to other prices in the economy.

• Gold and bits, two sides of the same coin

If you have to convert from bitcoins to U.S. dollars to pizzas to know how much your money is worth, it is the U.S. dollar, not the bitcointhat is the measure of exchange. The bitcoins are merely a speculative investment.

With some economically inclined friends, I was puzzling over a historicalequivalent of the bitcoinphenomenon where a currency rises exponentially in value.

One comparison that works is created by its opposite, hyperinflationthat extraordinarycollapse in the value of money usuallycaused by mismanagement by a country's treasury.

The classic case was prewar Germany where ultimately people required wheelbarrows of paper currency to transact everyday business.

It is well known that stable pricing is essential toa healthy economy.

The destabilizing effect of changing prices will be familiar to Canadians who have lived in places like Brazil or Zimbabwe where merchants used chalk boards to update on an hourly basis.

In those places, the U.S.dollar appeared to people trading the local currency similar to the way bitcoinhas appeared this year, soaring higher and higher with no prospect of decline.

If that is the correct modelfor what we are seeing now, then all the world'sfiat currencies are collapsing while bitcoinsretain their true value.

The tulip mania

But there is another time when we have seen exponential curves like the bitcoingraph above.

That has been during periods of speculative madness, such as the famous tulip mania in the Netherlands where people who hardly knew theirtulip from theironion were buying up bulbs in the certainty they would become rich. Of course, that ended badly.

Earlier this week, a colleague popped over to my desk and asked me if I knew anything about the cyrptocurrency.

"Are bitcoinsused for anything other than criminal activity?" she asked.

The question had arisen because a friend's husband had recently boughtsome to take advantage of the soaring prices and the friend wanted to be reassured that he wasn't participating in something crooked.

• Ransomware attack reveals bitcoin as an accessory to cybercrime

Of course bitcoins are used for legal trade, butwhen she asked, it struck me that one of the places where cryptocurrencies retain their worth despite asoaring or uncertain value is where anonymity is paramount.

In such uses as smuggling money out of a country with currency controls, moving cash under the radar of tax collectors or police, the inconvenienceof changing price levels may be wellworth the cost, thus contributing to bitcoin's astronomical value.

That may change as bitcoin alternatives, such as Canada's Ethereum, become more universally traded.

As traders watch bitcoinvalues soar, it's hard not to think of each new cryptocurrencylaunch as a path to speculativeriches.

But if one of the new electronic currencies really wants to replace the fiat money that we use every day, becominga true universal unit of exchange,the one they invent cannot act like a rocket ship heading for space.

Instead, the winningcomputer whizzeswhose names will go down in history are those whoinvent a cryptocurrencywhere we will all know the value not only now and next year but decades into the future.

Follow Don on Twitter @don_pittis

More analysis from Don Pittis