I wonder if Longecity would consider taking donations in Bitcoin!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
http://www.weusecoins.com/en/
Bitcoin (BTC) is a cryptocurrency that allows for globally accepted anonymous transactions through a secure decentralized network. It is the first currency in the world that allows people to have full control over storage and transfer of their money with zero counter-party risk with no fraud, no chargebacks and no counterfeit coins. It has no governmental or central bank control and therefore is not taxable or subject to regulation. The supply of money is self-regulated and behaves similar to gold and cannot be inflated. It is designed to be deflationary. It even has advantages over gold. It can be exchanged anywhere the Internet is available.
It's an invention of a mysterious – and, to date, unidentified – programmer who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto and claimed to be a 36-year-old Japanese male. He launched Bitcoin on 3 January 2009 and disappeared entirely from the net in April 2011, saying that he was moving on to other things. A Pulitzer prize awaits the journalist who unmasks him. At the moment, all we have is the verdict of Dan Kaminsky, a leading internet-security expert who examined the Bitcoin code and concluded that "Nakamoto" was "a world-class programmer with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language" who also "understands economics, cryptography and peer-to-peer networking. Either there's a team of people who worked on this or this guy is a genius."
Bitcoin is fully detailed in the official white paper found here: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf . The abstract begins “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution (emphasis added).” This is precisely what is currently taking place today and the potential impact this will have on the world economy and nation states are yet to be determined but Bitcoin’s latest market price of over $144 ( as of this writing) and billion dollar economy is certainly generating some buzz as media outlets, governmental regulatory agencies, and central banks all start to take notice.
"The root problem with conventional currency," wrote Nakamoto in 2009, "is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts." In contrast, everything in Nakamoto's system "is based on crypto proof rather than trust".
People ask “What is it BTC backed by?” Bitcoin is backed exclusively by the public’s trust; most likely motivated either by consumers or business interests attracted to zero (or close to zero) transactional fees, full control over storage and transfer of money with zero counter-party risk, reduced risk/costs associated with fraud, no chargeback risks, no counterfeit coins, a belief in the infallible and predictable nature of mathematics, the security inherent in the currency’s reliance on cryptography, transparency derived from open source (and therefore publicly verifiable) nature of the programming code, full accounting of all transaction history stored universally in what is called the “blockchain” , and/or is attractive to users with increased privacy needs or who, if proper steps are taken, wish to send and receive payments anonymously or wish to sell or obtain goods or services that are banned or restricted by local governments. The designers have also put an upper limit on the number of Bitcoins that can be created ruling out in advance the type of quantitative easing (QE) or money printing that has worried savers throughout the developed world. This deflationary nature is appealing to those concerned about inflation brought about by governmental/central bank intervention destroying the purchasing power of savings denominated in the fiat currencies of those respective countries.
The Bitcoin phenomenon is one of the most intriguing things to have happened in cyberspace since the invention of the peer-to-peer networking that undermined the music business (BitTorrent is still widely used in spite of numerous RIAA lawsuits, for example) and enabled developments such as Wikileaks.
They are counterfeit-proof. There are about 11 million bitcoins now, with a maximum limit of 21 million, a protection against inflation. It's a currency governed by math, not governments. The transaction fees are either very low or nonexistent. It's open-source software, and it can be anonymous to send and to receive bitcoins, if certain steps are taken. It's also easy to send large amounts of value across borders quickly. And because there is no middleman, it reduces fees, such as those businesses have to pay to credit card companies.
Edited by JChief, 21 November 2013 - 07:13 AM.
