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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

This article is surprisingly good. I like the mention of Bitcoin being the "world's first" decentralized digital currency. This is a clear way to convey to the reader that Bitcoin very is different from everything else. I use the same term in my Bitcoin introduction: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=66

The Economist author only made one error: Bitcoin is not the only decentralized digital currency. Some forks exist (eg. Litecoin), although they have very little traction currently; see the Alternate Cryptocurrency board: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

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Totally off-topic: the "vertical-align: top" on line 30 of your style.css is making any non-bold, non-italic body text get vertically misaligned with neighboring bold or italic text in Chrome 22 on Windows 7.

Removed. Thanks!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the others just merely clones of the original Bitcoin, using the same source code? I would still call Bitcoin the only currency, as it's the base they all share.

In this case, multiple currencies can share the same code base, in the same way The pound and the dollar share most of th same rules Of fiat currency.

It seems like there's a bit of terminology overloading going on. You have Bitcoin the protocol, which all these things are using, but you also have Bitcoin the currency, which is separate from the other currencies using the same protocol but with different networks (or block chains or whatever you call it).

"...a sort of eBay for drugs hidden in a dark corner of the web known as Tor..."

What's the issue with that? The .onion sites definitely make up a dark corner.

Maybe the eBay bit: Silk Road uses zero auction features (if you don't like a price, you can either not buy, or buy from a different vendor), you can't sign up to be a seller for free, and the general experience is more comparable to using Amazon's third-party sellers.

On the other hand eBay has been encouraging the 'buy it now' options the last couple years. Auctions are so passé.

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