Current Events > "Bitcoin" now worth several dollars

(+) Yeah! (+)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency

There are lots of ways to make money: You can earn it, find it, counterfeit it, steal it. Or, if youre Satoshi Nakamoto, a preternaturally talented computer coder, you can invent it. Thats what he did on the evening of January 3, 2009, when he pressed a button on his keyboard and created a new currency called bitcoin. It was all bit and no coin. There was no paper, copper, or silverjust thirty-one thousand lines of code and an announcement on the Internet.

Nakamoto, who claimed to be a thirty-six-year-old Japanese man, said he had spent more than a year writing the software, driven in part by anger over the recent financial crisis. He wanted to create a currency that was impervious to unpredictable monetary policies as well as to the predations of bankers and politicians. Nakamotos invention was controlled entirely by software, which would release a total of twenty-one million bitcoins, almost all of them over the next twenty years. Every ten minutes or so, coins would be distributed through a process that resembled a lottery. Minerspeople seeking the coinswould play the lottery again and again; the fastest computer would win the most money.

Interest in Nakamotos invention built steadily. More and more people dedicated their computers to the lottery, and forty-four exchanges popped up, allowing anyone with bitcoins to trade them for official currencies like dollars or euros. Creative computer engineers could mine for bitcoins; anyone could buy them. At first, a single bitcoin was valued at less than a penny. But merchants gradually began to accept bitcoins, and at the end of 2010 their value began to appreciate rapidly. By June of 2011, a bitcoin was worth more than twenty-nine dollars. Market gyrations followed, and by September the exchange rate had fallen to five dollars. Still, with more than seven million bitcoins in circulation, Nakamoto had created thirty-five million dollars of value.

...

---

same
---

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency
---

Better sell now, that's already like 10k% increase!
---

Pepys Monster posted...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency

OldNewsNetwork posted...
---

neat
---

OldNewsNetwork posted...

Please consider donating to ONN. Our internet is very slow.

Ha ha ha ha.
---

*coughing fit of laughter*
---

Damn I wish I had seen this in 2011
---

Pepys Monster posted...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency

TC is a gimmick. Unlike yours, it's entertaining.
---

This is a good gimmick
---

call them g-coins and im in
---

Turbam posted...

This is a good gimmick

---

Fuck a bitch I should have bought into this when it came out.
---

What is it like buying things with bitcoins since they're worth like 11 grand each? Can people buy fractions of bitcoins? Like specifically buy $100 worth of bitcoins?
---

Capn Circus posted...

What is it like buying things with bitcoins since they're worth like 11 grand each? Can people buy fractions of bitcoins? Like specifically buy $100 worth of bitcoins?

Yes
---