Bitcoin - Decentralized Digital Currency

Bitcoin has been making a lot of news in the past month so a handful of people met to discuss them.

We watched the short video here to brief newcomers to the concept: http://www.weusecoins.com/

Their perceived value is currently fluctuating rapidly. Last week they were being sold for over $8 USD each, during the presentation they were selling for about $6 USD and now they are back up to $7 USD: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zvztgSzm1g10zm2g25

Bitcoin 'mining' helps keep the network healthy by rewarding people who verify blocks of transactions with 50 BTC. These block verifications happen once every ten minutes approximately. As bitcoins get mined more quickly, the difficulty increases. As more blocks get solved, the BTC rewared decreases. There are currently over six million bitcoins in the world with a total cap of about 21 million.

Bitcoins in existence over time: http://www.investitwisely.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Total...

Difficulty and network hashing strength over time: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png

Because the difficulty is currently skyrocketing it will take my laptop over 14 months at the currently difficulty (on average) to mine one block. In two weeks the difficulty will increase, so the odds of one machine successfully verifying one block of transactions is near zero. Because of this people are joining mining pools to share a payout for a lesser amount. Deepbit is the largest of these pools http://deepbit.net/ Deepbit is about 30% of all hashes currently: http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/

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I should be getting my pound of coffee any day now :)

Here are some bitcoin accepting sites: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

To accept bitcoins all you need is a bitcoin address which is generated by the client. There are also existing FOSS solutions that plug into existing shopping cart systems for accepting bitcoins. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Shopping_Cart_Interfaces