Bitcoin

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http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/onl ... rnments/2/

I am interested. What dost thou more technological savvies sayest about this

(I don't know why I'm writing like that)

It is an interesting concept, IMHO.

Interesting, but I'm still a little wary of a distributed network handling money. Of course, it's probably very secure and maybe even harder to hack than a central bank, but I would have to look for holes myself before trusting it. Also, there seem to be very few places it can be used for now, but that's the price of being an early adopter.

Although this is a new kind of currency. What is being traded are blocks and transactions are also recorded in blocks. Blocks take large amounts of cpu processing power to create, and the network adjusts the difficulty of creating a block depending on how fast(or slow) blocks are created. For example if blocks get created regularly every 2 mins the difficulty of creating blocks will be readjusted so that it will require more processing power to create blocks. The reason for the creation of blocks is to solve the problem of double spending. Once a transaction gets recorded in a block and that block gets distributed among the bitcoin network participants and the specific block is accepted as valid(by verifying the digital signature) using the technology of public key cryptography, then the transaction is considered valid. (after 6 block creations which may on average take an hour). Also each 210.000 blocks count also as a currency with each block having a value of 50 BTC(Bitcoins). The next 210 thousand blocks will have half the value of BTC rounded down. At a far future moment blocks will not have any value, but will still serve the purpose of validating a transaction. Instead of clarifying the issue I'm afraid I may have confused ya.


What developers are worried about is people using it on insecure systems. Someone lost a lot of Bitcoins who had the Bitcoins on a Windows computer with the plan to move the Bitcoins next day to an Ubuntu or computer with linux, although those Bitcoins were stolen.

One of the main Bitcoin developers Gavin Andresen says you should not invest in Bitcoin because it is still in an experimental stage. I'm not investing in it...not because I read what Gavin Andresen advised but I kind of think just like Gavin that Bitcoin is still in an experimental stage.

Now that you mention it, why not read this: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/06/i_ ... ed_it.html

About a person who paid 0.52 BTC (Bitcoins) for a meal at Meze Grill.

"The owner calculated the current exchange rate, which has fluctuated wildly in recent months amid rampant hype about Bitcoin. My lunch was $5.51 plus tax: I owed him 0.52 bitcoins."

Which also invalidates the myth that Bitcoins are always used to escape taxes which is simply hype.

I read about bitcoins in an article posted here. There were also some bitcoin discussions on the forum of the website, but it is necessary to be a member to view them. I initially thought the article was a hoax, people 'bitmining' for this currency on dedicated 'rigs'. It is interesting, but I am not interested in buying any bitcoins, or making any.

If I created that system, I would have harvested myself a nice pile of $1m USD worth of bitcoin back when it was easy and now be selling it off strategically to avoid a market crash.