bitcoins are a nonexistant currency. they don't exist as an actual physical entity. there was a guy who was in on bitcoins from the first and , to track bitcoins and have ownership, you do that with your computer. anyway, he had all his bitcoins on a hard drive and forgot about it when he was cleaning his garage.....and tossed the hard drive out with about 9 million dollars worth of bitcoins. and it was lost forever in the landfill....see why you back up data? 4951
What Are Bitcoins? Virtual Currency Explained (Like You're an Idiot)http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/bitcoins-virtual-currency-explained-idiot/story?id=20926230Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency introduced as open source software in 2009 by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. It is a cryptocurrency, so-called because it uses cryptography to control the creation and transfer of moneyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin 4951
My son explained bitcoins to me. The way he explained it, it wouldn't have mattered if that guy made a backup of his harddrive because the bitcoins cannot be copied, only transferred.  I don't understand how you can "own" something electronically and not be able to copy it. I'm a little leery of something new like this until it has proven itself. 4951
i'd be a LOT leery of this rubbish...not to mention the value fluctuates a great deal so that it is like owning a commodity. when the guy tossed his hard drive, the bitcoins were valued at 1200 a piece. they have dropped as low as 800 and gone back up and down so i think i will stick with dollars 4951
Bitcoins were designed by their creator to be an open source, distributed currency where the power to regulate money and "print money" was not in the hands of a centralized bank or countryIt was also designed to act as an anonymous digital currency, much like real physical cash. Your name and information is in no way connected to your bitcoin "wallet", only a special code. Bitcoins are "mined" through computer functions. Your computer tries to break high level algorithms through sheer random number punching. For every bitcoin mined, the difficulty of breaking the algorithm rises. It is no longer feasible to mine bitcoins with your personal computer. The difficulty has gotten so high only specialized circuit boards called application-specific integrated circuits(asic) are able to mine the coin profitably. Because of the open source nature of bitcoins, other developers have created crypto-currencies with the bitcoin source code, changing a few aspects they deem need changing. There are now dozens of other cryto-currencies. Most have no real value. Some do, like litecoin, which changed how mining works to ensure asic mining does not completely control the source of new litecoins. Bitcoins are described as the "gold" of crypto-currencies, while litecoins would be the "silver" standard.Many people see these crypto-currencies less as a real currency and more as a commodity that can be traded. There are real time day trading markets for crypto-currencies and if you happened to catch on early, you could have made a huge profit off of bitcoins. 4951