Bitcoins

What are bitcoins?

Bitcoin is the world's most widely used alternative currency with a total market cap of approximately $13.0 billion. Alternative because of it's geek roots, bitcoins are often labelled as the "Currency of the Geeks".  But why? It appears that the bitcoin project was started in 2009 by an mysterious programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto. He only communicated electronically, never answered personal questions. Of course conspiracy-minded speculate that the pseudonym Nakamoto was actually a group of people, or a government cryptographer... Alien?

But since bitcoins have reached the mythical 1000$ per bitcoin threshold - there's a lot of talk about this new monetary system that was previously seen as a underdog money for geeks.

See for yourself

My recommendation would be to give it a try and learn for yourself - there's an easy way to do this - just start with http://trybtc.com/ - This website will give you a tour of what you can do with bitcoins, and then will give 0.01$ that you will put in your wallet at coinbase.com.

There's nothing to lose, just register and after that you can donate or receive bitcoins.

Beware though the value of bitcoin isn’t fixed. It fluctuates based on what the market is willing to pay. So even though now the value exceed 1000$ it can go down and reach 0.02$ or go up and reach 10,000$ by the end of the Year...

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/11/bitcoin-one-thousand

While economists have had a mixed reaction to Bitcoin in the past - Investors are quite worried to miss the opportunity to jump on board.

A nice community

The community is quite friendly, there are some urban legend such as people finding on an old usb key their first attempt at mining back in 2009 (at the beginning) and discover that in fact they had a pretty good amount of bitcoins right now ... and that in fact they are millionaire!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2013/11/30/from-treasure-to-trash-man-tosses-out-bitcoin-wallet-on-hard-drive-worth-9-million/

Or  like this college student, who after created a bitcoin wallet, got a QR code printed on cardboard with the details of the wallet, drove to a location where a TV crew filming and received $24k in bitcoin donations...

http://www.ibtimes.com/college-football-sign-earns-26000-student-receives-bitcoin-donations-after-qr-code-featured-college

Links
https://blockchain.info/wallet
http://trybtc.com/
https://coinbase.com/

Here's my QR code feel free to donate too :

1CNVwZW8xwFw5vt2iotu1xKxgSgMfAth15