This looks like a really great way to send money P2P without having to deal with the middleman banks!

I've seen this around, being used by sites that are anonymous by nature.

A great way to send money out of country.

Im sad i did not buy bitcoins at 20 cent/coin now that they're at 8$.

Well, we all know what bitcoin is good for and...

Was just looking at this yesterday, downloaded the purse app but not delved too deeply yet. Anyone put Bitcoin into use yet here?

OT: I've started mining with my GPU and a BTC pool, but it seems like i'm making 8 cents / day so it's not really worth it

https://mtgox.com/ seems to be the major site to trade bitcoins.

So...what I'm still confused about, especially as far as decentralizing everything is how to convert straight cash to bitcoin without going through an agency monitored by the government. It seems to me that there is still a bottleneck or a roadblock to anonymity if you are forced to buy tons of visa giftcards or engage in similar activities in order to convert significant hard currency to bitcoin.

elru, you seem to really get this stuff, can you help me out here?

There was an article yesterday about this in Slate Magazine.

Snozz, Im not really informed on bitcoin, maybe others like elru/house/benz/etc can give more info, but here's what it seems to me: Its not that banks or other institutions cant know you have money, is that they cant know HOW you got that money.. The problem with paypal and bank transfers and what not, is that there will always be a tracking, a connection between who received and who sent. With bitcoin, the money will come from the generic bitcoin pool, its impossible to know if the money came from buying entheogens or buying books.

I got you, but even so, theoretically, if you could put cash into bitcoin anonymously (like with a money order) people who work in the service industry or similar arenas would be able to avoid reporting their hard-earned tips and still use them in an identical fashion to cash in the online marketplace (as opposed to having to do everything in real world stores and at offline prices). Having numerous friends in the service/restaurant industries, this is something I would love to tell them about if there is such a way to apply it.

I hope it is cool to say I have used Bitcoin several times. I've known about for about a month and half or so, when I first encountered them, there were about 0.4 of them to the US $. Now it is $8 to 1 Bitcoin! There has been a lot of media coverage recently with articles on Time and Forbes and the Bitcoin has definitely been attracting some serious interest. Hopefully the fluctuations and inflation will go down with time. So far though from my experience of it, I think it is something with incredible potential. Being able to send electronic currency to anywhere in the world for free, essentially instantly and anonymously could be of interest to some. Each time you make a transaction your Bitcoin address changes. There was a way of obtaining Bitcoins instantly via PayPal, but a week ago the person running this system had their account frozen by PayPal. To be fair though I don't think they are anyone's pal in this respect, probably for the best. Also it is interesting that the currency is in no way controlled by any government or banking system. With the recent recession stuff I can't help but think that's a good thing. One can obtain Bitcoins discretely via cash in mail and things like Western Union. One needs to know the people they are dealing with in this regard of course but there are definitely legitimate services for this kind of thing out there.


The article in Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/fo...sen-crypto-currency.html

The value/exchange rate is incredibly volatile with Bitcoin. Sticking with Pecunix is safer for now.

But the lack of anonymity kind of defeats the purpose for those of us interested in bitcoin's anonymity...or did I miss something here?

Personally I find the variable exchange rate exciting for some reason.

Pecunix is pretty anonymous; it even incorporates PGP data encryption. Bitcoin probably does offer more anonymity, but its market is too volatile to place considerable holdings into it.

Anyone hear of bitcoin mining? My first intro to bitcoin was reading this from Cryptome.

"Really, it's all like a lottery; and the miners get their systems entering the lottery a billion times per second.

Currently, the bitcoin network produces about 1.5 trillion hashes per second, total. So somebody managing a billion a second, in a mining pool, earns about a 1500th of the total "income" of new bitcoin - 50 every ten minutes..."

Sounds interesting right? Another site said the income was about $15 an hour (- electricity, $ transfer tax, machine usage, ect.) just for having you computer on. I am however still confused at how this new currency is just that, a currency. And how does mining it come up with money from nowhere?

^I haven't generated a single bitcoin (Ive been mining for 2 days now)

Use a pool.
If you discover a bitcoin block it means getting 50 coins at once. With a pool you get less, but constant BTCs.

..and 15$/hour seems far off. I'm generating maybe 50-80 cents per 24h.

Thanks for the tip. I may have to pick your brains in the chat sometime soon as it appears to be a little over my head

Here's a tutorial for bitcoin GPU mining for all those who are interested, some of you are probably already doing this but im sure there's a lot of people who dont know how and would like to know

Holy cow! Heard this on NPR today...

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/24/136620231/what-are-bitcoins

Guess it's gaining some ground.