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[cptcangaroo]

I think it would be great if you could accept bitcoin at your store. I think the sex toy business is a perfect candidate for bitcoin adoption due to the desire for privacy and anonymity.

[SuperM4n]

I've been involved with bitcoin for awhile - I even ran mining rigs.

The reason a lot of businesses haven't adopted it yet is because they're afraid of gov. regulations and such along with fly by night businesses getting involved with it. Another problem is it can have very large swings in value since it's a small market. It's still a bit premature.. If it matures well, I think you'll see broader acceptance of it, and this is already starting to happen.

[DaaaBears]

Ok I just looked up bitcoins........and for the life of me I don't understand how it works. Can someone explain it to me? Like if I was running a shop and I accept bitcoins, can I take those bitcoins and turn them into actual money so that I can buy more products for my shop?

What is it about a program that can mine you coins?!?!?! So confused.

[SuperM4n]

Bitcoin is a Peer 2 Peer cryptocurrency. Think something like torrents, except peers are found through IRC and some other means. The "mining" part basically bruteforces keys that allow a transaction to take place. Graphics processors are the best ad bruteforcing cryptographic keys which is why they're used.

Right now the currency is inflating until it caps out at (21 million?) coins. So anytime anyone solves it they get a payout. The problem is - so much computing power is required now because difficulty has gone up that it would take you having an entire data center to regularly get "blocks" or coins from  mining. This is why most people join merged mining groups.

In other words if you're not a geek forget trying to mine coins. Most of it's not for profit just like some of the other various shared computing projects. (Folding@Home, etc)

Once inflations stops in the cryptocurrency the miners will be paid in transaction fees. Right now there aren't any transaction fees really. Which makes it far superior to Paypal or Credit cards for online payments in that respect - it's like dealing with cash. Cash is very hard to track, and so is Bitcoin. The difference is that bitcoin is cash that never inflates once it's introductory period is over. Kind of like how people treat Gold today.

As far as converting it to a "real" currency (which real currencies aren't backed by anything either, other than debt in the USA's case) you can go to an exchange like Mt. Gox. (it appears that mtgox is acting like a bitcoin payment processor now - so you might just get USD automatically once someone sends you bitcoin)

The problem is that there aren't that many people involved in the bitcoin economy right now so the value can swing wildly. It's been pretty stable for about a year though, in the $10 - 12 range, which is good compared to a little over a year ago where it swung from $30 to $4 in a matter of months.

"owning" bitcoins is more like owning cryptographic keys rather than paper money, but they are not reproducible. If you lose your keys you lose the bitcoins forever and no one else can have them either. Bitcoins can be divided down to extremely small amounts so it's unlikely lost coins will ever be an issue, the market will just adjust.

If you want more info just read over the bitcoin wiki. I'm just pulling this stuff from memory as I haven't been involved for awhile.

[Merr]

-confuzzled-

will definitely try to read up more. how are you bruteforcing ads?