have been hearing max keiser talking about it on keiser report.i tried looking it up on google but am still in the dark tbh. he reckons it will help give it to the man (slap the banksters e.t.c 😉 and return power to the people e.t.c (or something like that 😕

as i have no money i cannot unfortunately help partake in the downfall of the establishment,but i will be routing for all of you who can 😀

p.s i know nothing about finance (as my post will probably testify to).

It’s an online, international currency that’s untraceable, so it’s used mainly for buying guns, drugs and other illegal stuff. Apparently exchange rates have rocketed recently.

You need to jump through hoops to get it ,you need linux and a computer you don’t mind potentially being hacked ,and risk the potential loss of money and after that once you get it, the world of drugs, guns ,hitmen and all the other good bits of your dreams can be had.Fake ID and the likes -the bit coin will crash but you can only(currently)buy the good stuff without a trace with it ???? Is it the Matrix or Alice in wonderland ??only time will tell ??

Eh? To buy bitcoins you just go to a bitcoin exchange online and buy them… Granted, I’m not suggest that’s a great idea. They basically based on gpu clock cycles not an actual thing of value like gold. I’m fairly sure that the US government could also ruin the market if they really wanted to by creating a load of miners to give them 51% of the power used to create them and then screwing with transactions.

I have read all the news articles on this, especially all the “coin mining virus” stuff, and i still haven’t a clue what it’s all about!

It’s seems a bit like each coin is a prime number and to create new coins you must discover new primes which is mathematically intensive (mining) and hence the quantity of currency is limited as is its growth (by CPU power).

it’s a very clever concept at least.

programmed in quantative easing, the rate of which is limited entirely by the CPU power mentioned above, with no political monetary policy influence.

also clever in that every transaction is recorded in a distributed database, so actually, technically the most traceable currency.

I always kept an open mind about it but never did speculate on a few coins.

Read this:

bitty mummy

Does seem a bit unstable:

Mt Gox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange, blamed an ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for trading lags and other connectivity problems over recent days.

The statement, issued on Thursday, goes on to speculate that the packet-flinging attacks by unknown parties may have been designed to destabilise the fledgling currency that relies on cryptography for transactions.

The attackers may have been attempting to trigger panic selling that they could then profit from by buying the currency at a low point timed to coincide with the temporary suspension of a series of attacks, it suggests.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/05/bitcoin_ddos_analysis/

I was interested in these a few years back when it was still worth the bother of mining using normal hardware. I think FPGAs have seen that off now.

My biggest concern at the moment would be the alarmingly regularity of hacks on online exchanges. People have lost thousands of pounds, often from newbie sysadmin mistakes like leaving unencrypted backup data mounted and accessible to the world or running outdated insecure software.

A non-exhaustive list of hacks…
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0

Another bubble (google dutch tulips)

teamhurtmore – Member
Another bubble (google dutch tulips)

Control is built into the currency, whether it’ll work or not, who knows.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply

or the dot com bubble

Can buy some interesting stuff on silk road [ NSFW to google AT ALL please dont] though – I read an article on it I have never used them or it
the link explains what it is so i have not hidden it
also some onfo on bitcoind

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/22/silk-road-online-drug-marketplace

That’s the second new word to do with currency I’ve never heard of and learned today, the other being Scrip.

Learn something new every day what a wonderful world tis t’interweb.

Looks like the bubble has burst

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/04/bitcoin-crashes-losing-nearly-half-of-its-value-in-six-hours/

“Control is built into the currency, whether it’ll work or not, who knows.”

Yah, but it’s very thinly traded and the demand side is important too.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=173227.0

MTGox is the biggest exhange online and they’re still vulnerable to stuff like this. Enough to make sure I don’t buy into it anytime soon!

According to Radio 4 you can buy pizza with it.

Tulip mania.

Supply is inflexible and ultimately limited to 21m units (allegedly).

The early adopters / investors make the most money just look at apple shares.