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BitCoin is a virtual currency that can be used to trade stuff between users or buy various services. It is a decentralized system so there is no bank creating the money and it's completely anonymous. It is also the worlds strongest currency, being worth about USD 8.2 per BTC when writing this (http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/).
There are a couple of ways of getting bitcoins. The first one is free but depends of the hardware in your computer. It's called mining, and what that means is that you run a miner program in the background which computes hashes on your CPU/GPU, much like distributed computing. Because of the current difficulty level of finding a "block", it is not a good idea to mine solo as it could take very long time to generate a "block" (a block is worth 50BTC). For a Intel i7 950 3.07GHz 8(4+4) core to generate a block takes 3 years in average. Joining a pool shares one block among many users, and you get a share of the 50BTC based on how many workunits you did.
A second way is obviously to sell something to someone with BTC, like a service or an item. The third way is to buy BTC with real money (which could be a good investment as the BTC value is rapidly increasing (2 days ago it was worth $5.5, toady it's $8.2), if you would be lucky to find someone you could sell those BTC too when the value has risen more).
Some references:
http://www.weusecoins.com/
http://www.bitcoin.org/
To start:
Get the client from http://www.bitcoin.org/ and a miner GUI from http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3878.0. Register at http://mining.bitcoin.cz. Add your wallet address from the bitcoin client to that site, create a new worker and put in the details in the miner GUI and let it run.
Also, anyone here already using it?
There are a couple of ways of getting bitcoins. The first one is free but depends of the hardware in your computer. It's called mining, and what that means is that you run a miner program in the background which computes hashes on your CPU/GPU, much like distributed computing. Because of the current difficulty level of finding a "block", it is not a good idea to mine solo as it could take very long time to generate a "block" (a block is worth 50BTC). For a Intel i7 950 3.07GHz 8(4+4) core to generate a block takes 3 years in average. Joining a pool shares one block among many users, and you get a share of the 50BTC based on how many workunits you did.
A second way is obviously to sell something to someone with BTC, like a service or an item. The third way is to buy BTC with real money (which could be a good investment as the BTC value is rapidly increasing (2 days ago it was worth $5.5, toady it's $8.2), if you would be lucky to find someone you could sell those BTC too when the value has risen more).
Some references:
http://www.weusecoins.com/
http://www.bitcoin.org/
To start:
Get the client from http://www.bitcoin.org/ and a miner GUI from http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3878.0. Register at http://mining.bitcoin.cz. Add your wallet address from the bitcoin client to that site, create a new worker and put in the details in the miner GUI and let it run.
Also, anyone here already using it?
