I know this is a lot to digest so let me present you the information in an easily digestible form.


Short introductory video
http://www.bitcoinblogger.com/2011/03/be....

Bitcoin: The Digital Currency of the Future
http://www.investitwisely.com/bitcoin-th....

Ever since the dawn of the Internet and of the information age, writers and visionaries have visualized the disruptive changes that such technologies would eventually have on our lives; they have imagined futures where we spend more of our lives online than offline, and where ubiquitous access to technology and connectivity would be a strong decentralizing force, placing power in the hands of the people.

One of the cornerstones of this vision is the need for a decentralized, distributed, and pseudonymous currency in order to digitally transmit value from person to person. You cannot truly transfer power into the hands of the people without giving them economic sovereignty, and they cannot have economic sovereignty so long as money and currency are tied to the real world and controlled by monopolistic central banks and governments.

Many various ideas have been tried over the years, such as RipplePay, eCache, and ecash. For various reasons, none of these systems have taken off. Why did they fail? Some of them were flawed because they relied on a centralized model, and others were flawed because they only work if humans are completely trustworthy, something that cannot always be relied upon. However, there is a new distributed currency which has been rapidly gaining in popularity, and it has the potential to succeed where others have failed. This new system is called Bitcoin.


Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin


Where to buy Bitcoins
http://www.mtgox.com
http://www.bitcoinusa.com

Bitcoin Technical Paper
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf


There is a lot more to this and we'll post more in this thread. Learn as much as you can about bitcoin though. This cryptocurrency has so much potential it's hard to state.

Bitcoin rallying the past few days.. bitcoin now over par with USD.

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUS....

Bitcoins already 60% higher than 1$.

1.60 $ today.

So...who accepts this as a form of payment?

It's not very widespread at the moment but if you look at their website they link to various merchants and to some nonprofits that accept it for donations.

For some reason this song is running through my head - "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."


If your a heel, buy into it.

Ha!

Nice write-up! Bitcoin up to ~2.60 today

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0509/t....

Bitcoin ~2.80 to 1 USD

risky investment, you bet... but this is a trading forum right?

http://bitcoinwatch.com/

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/....

Quote:

...a range of mechanisms that allow for peer-to-peer value exchange through mutual credit systems like LETS or via decentralized currencies like Bitcoin. When the tools are in place to allow individuals or groups within a local area to easily exchange value without using traditional/centralized currency, it’s reasonable to expect a serious challenge to the ingrained public perception of money.

This is Ponzi-style BS...right?

Chingas wrote..

This is Ponzi-style BS...right?

Currency speculation is a zero-sum game. If people start producing goods and services and selling them for Bitcoins rather than just buying them when the they're cheap and selling them when another news story pumps the price up that would be a positive-sum game.

"Gold 2.0" is an accurate description at these prices

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-p....I think this guy is foolish for putting his entire life savings into Bitcoin but he has some good points about the advantages of the currency.

Quote:

As I hit Send, which I did right after taking this screenshot, my friend in New Zealand got this coffee money instantly, and it was deducted from my balance.

Sounds easy and straightforward, doesn’t it? It sounds just too easy. So just to illustrate, let’s take a look at all the normal things that didn’t happen:

1. Nobody logged on to a bank of any kind.
   
2. No bank page for complicated foreign transactions was loaded into any browser.
   
3. No expensive foreign transfer fees were applied. In fact, no transfer fees were applied at all.
   
4. No banks were holding on to the money for a couple of days. My friend had the money instantly.
   
5. No bank holidays were relevant. I did this on a Sunday.
   
6. No governmental economic blacklist was consulted. He could be a criminal under New Zealand law for all I care, but what matters to me is that he is my friend.
   
7. Nobody got the chance to seize the money before my friend in New Zealand got it. Or afterwards.
   
8. An alternative to a bank transfer would have been to use Visa or MasterCard. They did not get a cut, either.
   
9. No tax authority saw the transaction or the money.
   

This is good ****, so good in fact that the government is going to shut it down lickity split because it interferes with its ability to manipulate and monitor money.

I am sure they will try but governments haven't been completely successful at shutting down decentralized networks in the past.

You also need to consider how many politicians are criminals and how having this type of network in existence benefits them personally.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD....

The mania coincides with the emergence of easy-to-use "mining pools."
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic....
http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=3878.0

This guy bought $20k of BTC at $0.80, then spent $8k on video cards (6 GH/s). He generated 5,000 BTC and now averages < 25 a day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O_8KocRr....

For a couple months, you could order Domino's.
http://coincard.ndrix.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5uoEqb3V....

Grow your own bittulips:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardwa....
http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=3878.0

Currently the Bitcoin:USD cross seems awfully volatile based on the info from Mt Gox's exchange.
https://mtgox.com/

The concept is quite intriguing, but the implementation of it seems a bit technically dense. Perhaps with simpler ways to make transactions and keep your bitcoin wallet safe it will gain wider acceptance?

Tulips! They're VALUABLE!

If you got in early they were. Not so much at the end.

The point is to buy and sell with them, not speculate.

Bitcoin just hit $25.00+ watch those graphs climb....lol

uhh.. make that $27.00

I like the idea here, but they have gone up too much too fast for me to even think about getting in on them. Now as soon as I finish building my time machine I will go back and load up the boat with these.

Get some now, or be priced out forever!

-Uwe-

Bitcoin - its better then heroin because there is no down side potential.


Ponzi, ponzi - suckerfish.

@Marketswork - what isn't a ponzi?

bartering