Is Bitcoin for real?

http://bitcoinmedia.com/compromised-linode-coins-stolen-from-slush-faucet-and-others/

Oh look another story about $15 grand in Bitcoins stolen, tons of stories about Bitcoin.

Are there real people investing in these? How easy is it to cash out? Wikipedia articles and shit are nice and informative but I’m wondering what its like in the real world.

It’s apparently the currency of choice for Silk Road, so make of that what you will.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘for real’. It’s a currency that is as real as many others, and it’s not only used for illegal purposes.

Pretty much anything I know is just from articles on Geekosystem. I don’t think it’ll last very much longer (maybe five years), but it was a nice idea.

I was taking a look at longbets.org the other day.

If you want to see a heroically incorrect prediciton about bitcoins, look at this

Huh, is Bitcoin still around? I followed it pretty closely last year. It was pretty entertaining: just a continuous comedy of errors as people got ripped off right and left. And no one could ever explain why anyone would want to use it for online transactions for anything legal, they were too desperate trying to get more people on board so their coins would go up in value.

Well an analogy would be a while back there was a thread in GQ about how in some states schedule 5 codeine cough syrup is legal for a pharmacist to sell OTC, or at least thats what the law says. However not a single person had ever been successful is actually purchasing any, in fact some chains it was explicitly against policy.

So in the same way I am wondering if anyone here has actually had experience or knows anyone that bought bitcoins or mined any and what the exchanges are like.

grude, have you a link to that thread? They can’t be trying very hard cause you can buy it on AMAZON of all places

anyway I remember someone showing me a thread on some bitcoin forum a few weeks ago where someone squeezed the market and posted their position in such a way that someone else could squeeze them, then complained about it. Was very funny, I’ll ask the person who gave me the link.

There you go.

And yea Bitcoin seems a bit scary for putting your money into it(well more than a few bucks).

WTF? Been doing a bit of research and You can trade bitcoins with serious leverage!

Despite their value being all over the damn place.

This is going to end in big tears. Take a look at the forum here - I can’t find the thread I was talking about earlier but there is much hilarity - I will be checking in on this every so often and enjoying the riches-to-rags stories.

Right dopers, here’s the challenge. I’m going to put $5 in a bitcoin trading account. We are going to see if we can build it up to $100 and then give it to charity - or lose it trying.

I need at least five people to agree that this sounds fun and agree that they will vote to go long orshort, then we can go for it.

Please reply to this post with your username and once I have the five I’ll start a new thread.

No expertise needed, wanted, or probably even exists! I know I’m just going to be gambling basically.

The platform is at http://bitcoinica.com/

I got the impression (again just from the few articles I read) that it was basically speculating for giant geeks. People were speculating with it and build huge computer farms (that then got mistaken for marijuana farms in a few instances because of the electrical usage) just to mine them. And then finding other ways of mining (browser based, mining pools, etc).

It’s the stock market for even geekier geeks.