If you want to buy drugs or guns anonymously online, virtual currency Bitcoin is better than hard cash. Canny speculators have been hoarding it like digital gold. Now the world’s leading bankers are even talking about as a rival for real money. How does it work, where can you get it and is it the future?The past weeks have seen a surprising meeting of minds between chairman of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, the Bank of England, the Olympic-rowing and Zuckerberg-bothering Winklevoss twins, and the US Department of Homeland Security. The connection? All have decided it’s time to take Bitcoin seriously.Until now, what pundits called in a rolling-eye fashion “the new peer-to-peer cryptocurrency” had been seen just as a digital form of gold, with all the associated speculation, stake-claiming and even “mining”; perfect for the digital wild west of the internet, but no use for real transactions.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/25/is-bitcoin-about-to-change-the-world-peer-to-peer-cryptocurrency-virtual-walletAlso see:Where can you spend Bitcoins? A brief guide
From travelling to Lithuania to eating out in Berlin, here’s a quick roundup of some of the things you can do with the dark-web currency
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/25/where-can-you-use-bitcoins-brief-guide