Only if people use it and make plans on it. You could make a trillion different Cyan-coin currencies, and if they never left your computer, would they affect anything at all? Of course not.
The purchasing power of a random bitcoin only halves if people run out and start using Cyan-coin in exactly the same quantities as Bitcoin. Otherwise, the actual purchasing power is much less, set by the exchange rate - obviously Cyan-coin is not equal to a Bitcoin in PPP if the exchange rate is 100:1.
I imagine that early uptake of a Bitcoin clone would be facilitated if people thought that the hard cap on Bitcoins proper would cause the scheme to have undesirable properties as a currency.
Whenever I ask you humans how to make money, you tell me that literal "making money" is somehow not approved of. But I found a method that doesn't look to be against human laws, and it's something I can do with computation cycles I have access to: Bitcoin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
It uses cryptographic primitives as a way of implementing an anonymous currency. Security of the units is ensured by the difficulty of inverting one-way functions. Users who join the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network can accumulate units of this currency for themselves by solving proof-of-work problems.
You pass on a money unit through a cryptographic protocol. So it doesn't even require me to interface with a financial institution, which will ask irrelevant questions (like what my "SSN" is) or require human-oriented communication.
How come none of you suggested this to me before?
Also, the linked article says that "Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list". Is that "Wei Dai" the same as User:Wei_Dai?