Originally published on March 31, 2014 by Florian Staffort
Last updated on March 03, 2022
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5 minute read
This article was published on 1st of April 2014. You face an April Fools' Day hoax here.
Introduction of Bitcoin Payment Accompanied by Sensor Market Fluctuations
Paessler AG, the innovative network monitoring specialist, today announced to have chosen Bitcoin as the only currency they from now on accept as payment for their comprehensive monitoring solution PRTG Network Monitor. After months of research and extensive testing, Christian Twardawa, Chief Operating Officer of Paessler AG, is glad his team of skilled technology enthusiasts have finally found a way of factoring sensor market fluctuations into the new Bitcoin pricing structure:
„When we started working on this project in October 2013, the Bitcoin price was 128 USD. So we based our calculations on this value.
In December 2013 the price skyrocketed to more than 1,100 USD, which got us thinking. That's when we came up with the first version of our Bitcoin-Sensor-Matrix.
The correlation between the Bitcoin price and the number of sensors per license at first gave us a headache, but we solved the issue by setting up a market for sensors. Basically it means the amount of sensors our customers buy per license varies based on the current Bitcoin value."
To illustrate how the sensor market has fluctuated during the testing period, Paessler AG released a chart, which gives an outlook on what might be expected in the future:
A closed beta revealed an interesting phenomenon: Customers wanted to trade sensors directly and actually use them as currency instead of Bitcoin. Within this beta test group the value of PRTG sensors soon exceeded the correlating Bitcoin value:
Paessler AG soon observed a kind of black market behavior, which led them to develop an official sensor trading platform, called SensorStock™. This platform will launch as open beta within the next few months. CEO Dirk Paessler can hardly put his astonishment into words:
"I never would have expected the introduction of Bitcoin as single payment method to have such a huge influence on the global exchange market. We always knew our sensors are the right way to monitor your network, but who would have thought they have the potential to outrank Bitcoin as digital currency?"
With the official launch of Bitcoin payment on April, 1st 2014 the network monitoring experts at Paessler AG are curious how this development will play out in the weeks to come...
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