They're traded on an exchange so price can vary like anything. There are actually some people who have built highly optimized render farms just to do the mining to then sell the coins, which are then used in a totally anonymous and untraceable way as money.

I want some give me. Can I get em from my phone?

It's illegal and it looks like a lot of people were using them to buy drugs. Surprise, surprise. Google the silk road + bitcoin.

BitCoin is used for a lot of things already. The Silk Road is just a pretense. Not that I care anyway. They're concern is competition to legal tender and money systems that make it easy to evade taxes. The gubment has shut down various forms of digital currencies in the past. The difference is those had centralized clearing houses which could be in some form physically seized. This one doesn't at all and will be far harder, maybe impossible to stop itself. We'll see how it goes. It's kind of unique in the history of money and difficult to clearly evaluate.

Eventually people will have to be able to cash out. They'll be able to stop financial institutions from doing that.

That's the point. The are more merchants and vendors selling goods and services denominated in BitCoin all the time. If it can reach some scale, and previous alternate currencies were well on their way before being shut down, it will be a sub economy with its own, fairly untouchable money system. No need to exchange. Awesome. :bandit: It really is some new territory.

It wasn't a Bitcoin fail it was a user fail that left their wallet.dat unencrypted and out in the open. Its like saying your bank failed because you lost your debit card. and lost all of the money out of your account,

The article is typically misleading. Even so you didn't read it beyond the headline or didn't understand what you were reading.

"BitCoin" and it's underlying decentralized network for control of money supply (the object of the technology), did not fail at all. NO ONE has found or even theorized a way to forge a coin or otherwise manipulate the supply. Do you understand this point?

Unencrypted Wallets (accounts) were robbed and a massive attempted conversion to cash was halted by the exchange, causing a short term panic on that market. That's it. Nothing more. Considering that security risk can be stopped with merely encrypting one's wallet, it's not even a systemic problem of any kind to be concerned about.

From the legal (and citizen boot-licker side) it is clear though, plenty of long knives out to try and stop BitCoin because the system is far more robust than anything tried before. As it becomes increasingly used as money directly, rather than trade to/from currency, it will be considerably stronger. The only thing events like this really show is that it is getting some scale and that's a good thing.

Fact: The stock market has had actual massive systemic transaction failures in the past.

Fact: The dollars in your bank account are losing purchasing power at a steady clip. It's a kind of stealth robbery via Cantillon effect.

Fact: Not one (1) fiat currency in human history has stood the test of time.

Am I psychic or what?:judge: