Bitcoin's Getting Some Traction
Dec 11 2010It’s an amazing time to be part of the Bitcoin family. With the Wikileaks scandal we had some quite heated discussions on whether to promote ourselfs as an alternative way for them to acquire funds, but in the end we decided not to, preferring not to be associated with a company being investigated by some countries. However the decision seems to have already been taken for us: as this article in PCWorld demonstrates we are not the only ones making that connection.
Furthermore people are investing more and more resources into Bitcoin as the confidence in the future of the currency grows. Currently the Bitcoin economy containing 4’464’000 coins is worth just short of 1 million USD (MtGox). Meanwhile the growing interest increased the difficulty to generate blocks (the means to acquire new coins and confirm transactions) to incredible heights, and newcomers are getting frustrated at how long it takes them to earn their first real coins. Luckily the Bitcoin Faucet and a pooled mining effort should counteract part of this problem, but the trend is quite clear, people that do not invest heavily into GPUs are will have nearly no chance at accumulating large quantities just by mining, but then where does a country just give you freshly printed money?
In the meantime a lot of discussion is going on about improvements to the Protocol, and what should be part of the Bitcoin ecosystem, specifically an alternative DNS system is in discussion, which would piggyback on the currency transactions.
That should be it for now, if you’re interested why not give Bitcoin a try, join us on the Forum or read up on the latest Developer discussions?