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Bitcoin Releases Version 0.3
Posted by kdawson on Sunday July 11, 2010 @09:09PM from the nobody-to-prosecute dept.
Teppy writes
"How's this for a disruptive technology? Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, network-based digital currency with no central bank, and no transaction fees. Using a proof-of-work concept, nodes burn CPU cycles searching for bundles of coins, broadcasting their findings to the network. Analysis of energy usage indicates that the market value of Bitcoins is already above the value of the energy needed to generate them, indicating healthy demand. The community is hopeful the currency will remain outside the reach of any government."
Here are the FAQ, a paper describing Bitcoin in more technical detail (PDF), and the Wikipedia article. Note: a commercial service called BitCoin Ltd., in pre-alpha at bitcoin.com, bears no relation to the open source digital currency.

WikiLeaks, Money, and Ron Paul
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 12, 2010 @01:16PM from the headlines-that-will-make-some-people-mad dept.
Another day, another dozen WikiLeaks stories, several of which revolve around money. PayPal has given in to pressure to release WikiLeaks funds, though they still won't do further transactions. Mobile payment firm Xipwire is attempting to take PayPal's place. "We do think people should be able to make their own decisions as to who they donate to." PCWorld wonders if the WikiLeaks' money woes could lead to great adoption of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency system we've discussed in the past. Meanwhile, Representative Ron Paul spoke in defense of WikiLeaks on the House floor Thursday, asking a number of questions, including, "Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?" The current uproar over WikiLeaks has prompted Paul Vixie to call for an end to the DDoS attacks and Vladimir Putin to break out a metaphor involving cows and hockey pucks.

Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity
Posted by timothy on Thursday February 10, 2011 @06:59PM from the computationally-intensive dept.
IamTheRealMike writes
"The BitCoin peer to peer currency briefly reached exchange parity with the US dollar today after a spike in demand for the coins pushed prices slightly above 1 USD:1 BTC. BitCoin was launched in early 2009, so in only two years this open source currency has gone from having no value at all to one with not only an open market of competing exchanges, but the ability to buy r

May I introduce you to their logo?
https://www.mtgox.com/img/mtgo...

For posteriority, since I'm sure Minitruth will visit your link when they notice it:

Bitcoin Exchange - A bitcoin exchange is a place we people buy and sell bitcoins for other currencies. We recommend Mt.Gox and Intersango. Once you have signed up for an account you will be able to wire money directly into the exchanges bank account. You then need to create an "Ask" or "Buy" order and buy the appropriate amount of bitcoin (BTC) at the current exchange rate. When you have completed a trade withdraw to the bitcoins to the address from step 2.

Of course both the "recommended" exchanges have ran off with their user's money. Hopefully blockchain.info at least got a cut.

Alright wiseguy, share with us details on how to impersonate a bank then ...

https://www.mtgox.com/

There is already at least one service that takes all of the research out of it from the seller's perspective.

I changed the link both because I'm a deeply horrible person underneath, and to kinda sorta explain my reservations with what you just said...

The index document on https://mtgox.com/ looks like this at the moment: MtGox.com

Cobblers. This keeps coming up and it's completely untrue. To transfer money from one person to another, the money needs to be in a currency that both parties accept. Typically (as in, always) this is whatever currency taxes are paid in, food is bought with, a bank accepts for mortgage costs and/or a landlord accepts for rent payment, utilities accept for service payments, and transportation infrastructure providers (be they energy, vehicle, or whole shebang) accepts for products and services rendered. It is also the currency wages are paid in.

As there is no country in the world as yet where Bitcoins are paid out or accepted by all or even most of these entities, the sending entity MUST convert your cash into Bitcoins to initiate a transfer, and the receiving entity MUST convert the Bitcoins back into cash at the end of the transfer. Both transactions result in a fee. The fee is lower than that charged for some transactions, but higher than charged for other types of transactions, when compared to a straight single currency cash transfer. (And don't even get me started on the uncertainty involved where you have no way of knowing whether youi'll even be able to convert the received # Bitcoins into the same number of $ORIGINAL_CURRENCY as sent.)

The same points can be made about transaction times and other supposed advantages of Real currency->Bitcoin->Real currency type transfers.

For real people, in the real world, engaged in legitimate transactions, Bitcoins are a terrible way to conduct business.

Whether it trades at $600 or $1200 today, a pair of trading partners in different countries can save a fucking fortune (in bank fees, not taxes) by buying BTC, denominating the trade in BTC, and converting back to the local currency.

According to Mt. Gox fee schedule, each conversion will cost you 0.60% (under 100 BTC.) Then two conversions (say, USD to BTC to USD) will cost you 1.20%. A wire transfer through a US bank costs $40 (a fixed fee) and you can transfer as much as you need. Let's say 1 BTC = USD 1000, and you want to send 100 BTC. Then the bank fees will be 40/100000 = 0.04%. The Bitcoin method is 30 times as expensive!

If you transfer less money, at some point BTC method and the bank method will be equally expensive. (Obviously, 40/x = 1.2%, and then x=40/0.012 = USD 3333.) Below that sum you will be better off using BTC; above that you will want to use your bank.

Your analysis ignores the bid/offer spread, which is currently $4 on mtgox, or 0.4%. This is effectively an extra cost for each transaction on top of the exchange fees, only this one goes to the market makers rather than the exchange itself. This changes your break-even point to $800.

Whether it trades at $600 or $1200 today, a pair of trading partners in different countries can save a fucking fortune (in bank fees, not taxes) by buying BTC, denominating the trade in BTC, and converting back to the local currency.

According to Mt. Gox fee schedule, each conversion will cost you 0.60% (under 100 BTC.) Then two conversions (say, USD to BTC to USD) will cost you 1.20%. A wire transfer through a US bank costs $40 (a fixed fee) and you can transfer as much as you need. Let's say 1 BTC = USD 1000, and you want to send 100 BTC. Then the bank fees will be 40/100000 = 0.04%. The Bitcoin method is 30 times as expensive!

If you transfer less money, at some point BTC method and the bank method will be equally expensive. (Obviously, 40/x = 1.2%, and then x=40/0.012 = USD 3333.) Below that sum you will be better off using BTC; above that you will want to use your bank.

The are exchange rates for Bitcoin. You can buy or sell at e.g. https://www.mtgox.com/

From its website, the Bitcooin Foundation "standardizes, protects and promotes the use of Bitcoin cryptographic money for the benefit of users worldwide". I don't see where it engages in money transmission.

Mt Gox is an example of an exchange. Except they are a Japanese company, over which the state of California has no authority. And perhaps not even the US Treasurey department. The transmission of Bitcoin is being handled by AT&T, other ISPs and Internet backbone operators. It is these companies that are enabling the movement (transmission) of Bitcoin and who should be penalized.

That's a typical Mt. Gox excuse. "We're going to hold onto your money for some vague amount of time for some vague reason." Note that they're only stopping withdrawals from Mt. Gox, not inbound transfers. That's very suspicious. If they'd lost their banking relationship for wire transfers, they couldn't do inbound transfers either.

I've mentioned before that Mt. Gox's withdrawal limits are suspicious. They should be able to pay out 100% of funds they hold on short notice. They're not a bank, and are required by the Payment Services Act of Japan to have 100% of the assets entrusted to them. Even more suspicious is that as Bitcoin has grown, Mt. Gox withdrawal limits have become smaller.

If you have assets in Mt. Gox, get them out now. There are too many red flags about that business.

I suspect the (very valid) reason they have withdrawal limits on exchanges is to provide some level of security; with withdrawal limits, they can limit the damage that a nefarious user can inflict upon the rest of the exchange's users by rolling back transactions. See https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20224998-Huge-Bitcoin-sell-off-due-to-a-compromised-account-rollback

If you knew anything about how exchanges work John, you'd know that withdrawal limits are typically imposed by the banks themselves and/or AML rules.

Yeah, right. Mt. Gox regularly blames the businesses they deal with for their own problems. If you have unencumbered assets with a a real brokerage firm, and you want it converted to cash and sent to your bank account, you can have it in three days, or they're in big trouble. Brokerages routinely deliver amounts in nine figures on demand. Mt. Gox wants a delay of two weeks to over one month for just US$10,000.

And we haven't even covered the Dwolla/Mt Gox/Mutum Sigillum LLC/Homeland Security debacle. Mt. Gox apparently claimed their money-transfer business unit wasn't in the money transfer business. That didn't end well for the customers.

Not 'Mount Gox'. Theres no such place.

Its Magic the Gathering Online exchange not Mt. Gox.

Dunno if you are mentally impaired or just blind but they label themself Mt.Gox right on the front page of their website mtgox.com

No matter where you look it up, it's always Mt.Gox, there is no "mount" in there. I dunno about any magic stuff...

Not 'Mount Gox'. Theres no such place.

Its Magic the Gathering Online exchange not Mt. Gox.

Dunno if you are mentally impaired or just blind but they label themself Mt.Gox right on the front page of their website mtgox.com

The fake Mt Gox sites are found on domains such as mtgox.org, mtgox.net. Existing customers and Bitcoin early adopters will likely not fall for this. This is likely targeting the non-tech-savvy followers who just heard through the media about a currency that can make you rich or a cool way to buy drugs. A search or two will unlikely lead a potential victim to one of these fake sites, so they are depending on the advertising. Details are scarce on how they are advertising.

"MtGox has read on the Internet that the United States Department of Homeland Security had a court order and/or warrant issued from the United States District Court in Maryland which it served upon the Dwolla mobile payment service with respect to accounts used for trading with MtGox. MtGox takes this information seriously. However, as of this time MtGox has not been provided with a copy of the court order and/or warrant and does not know its scope and/or the reasons for its issuance. MtGox is investigating and will provide further reports when additional information becomes known.

Regards
Mt.Gox Co. Ltd Team."

https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130515.html

Last price:$120.30000
High:$141.90000
Low:$104.00000
Volume:169141 BTC
Weighted Avg:$122.02937
- https://mtgox.com/

And the most exchange rates at MtGOX are already back up to $200 after a big rally yesterday, so it's apparently correcting just fine for anyone who is looking to sell their bitcoins worth 10x or 100x what they used to be.

So yeah, Botcoins are subject to wild swings in exchange rates.

Mtgox, that largest bitcoin exchange in the world. You must be right, it must not work. lol. I suppose you think it being Japanese is somehow a negative?

Well the site was entirely unresponsive when I tried them last night. Does not instill much confidence. And you must admit, it's quite complicated to sell bitcoins there and get USD into a bank account. You're paying Mtgox their ~ 1% fee, then you pay another fee either to another processor or for an international wire transfer. There is a daily and other periodic withdrawal limits, and with each taking 5 business days, and frequent "unexpected delays", and who knows how long it would take for a sale transaction to take place, well, it still leaves bitcoin as a not-very-useful medium of exchange.

"My landlord hasn't heard of them and isn't interested. He can't buy groceries with them either, so why would he. I transfer my rent payment from my bank to his every month, and he pays his mortgage the same way. I'm sure he would tell me his mortgage holder isn't going to take bitcoins either."

Apparently you missed all that about bitpay... which would deposit local currency into his bank account within 24hrs. There is a 0.99% fee but he probably would be okay with that since unlike your bank transfer it can't be reversed.

You're kidding, right? So I tell my landlord to first set up an e-commerce website, then a merchant account with bitpay, and then take a 1% hit for all that? No, I'm quite sure he would NOT be "okay with that". I don't know what kind of bank transfers you're talking about, but once I send him a transfer from my bank, there is nothing I can to reverse it. I'm sure banks can do whatever they want, but so can all these websites and if they go dark, all you can do is hope you don't have much "money" lost when they disappear.

The important number is how many dollars could be extracted from the market by a mining company. Mt.Gox claims to make up a large part of the Bitcoin to real money market. The entire exchange trades about $100,000 per day of volume. Call it $35 million per year. Given the total size of the market, a company with ASIC production capabilities would be hard pressed to expect even $10M/year of revenue from a large investment in mining hardware development.

For comparison sake, even CPU underdog AMD generates $16M of revenue every day. Intel does 10X that much. It takes billions of dollars to create a new manufacturing fab facility for chips. And total trading volume for the major stock exchanges involve trillions of dollars moving around every day.

There would need to be roughly an order of magnitude increase in the size of the daily Bitcoin trading market before I'd expect serious hardware companies or investors to even notice. A slice of a $100M/year market would be big enough to draw attention.

Except that you can trade these BTC back into "real money" at the same place you probably got them anyways

That price is from MtGox.com. It's increased quite a bit over when I last checked a few months ago, so apparently demand keeps increasing.

http://mtgoxlive.com/orders
So where did the price go down by 30-50%?

I am looking at the news that came out this morning, and the dip in prices a little over a week ago, and struggling to put it together just how these are related.
https://mtgox.com/

You can find the weekly and monthly graphs on the main page, link at the very top of the site.

Insider trading??? :)

I highly doubt the majority of the 40k coins circulate within MtGox without leaving it. Or else traders would erode their capital because MtGox charges hefty trading fees: https://mtgox.com/fee-schedule

Namecoins should be able to help here: a decentralized DNS with its own currency for registering DNSes (which already proved to be useful as bitcoins). Nobody will be able to block some DNS if you bought it with namecoins, because this DNS is yours, right in your wallet.dat. And everyone who installed a namecoin based DNS client can use it. All DNS names are stored with transaction data within namecoin block chain. This blockchain is copied on thousands of client's PC connected in p2p network. This blockchain is encrypted with 60 PetaFLOPs/sec processing power, which makes them really safe! (namecoin difficulty is now 463897, compare that with PFLOPS used for bitcoin for example on bitcoinwatch).

No government will be able to stop namecoins, just like it's impossible to stop bitcoins. Well it's even better for namecoins. Bitcoins could theoretically be restricted by passing laws prohibiting banks to cooperate with mtgox. Namecoins on the other side do not need exchange with USD for DNS functionality to be working. Such exchange of course will be good, but you can buy namecoins using bitcoins on bitparking exhange, or mine them on slush's pool (the biggest namecoin/bitcoin pool). Domains are really cheap, you should be able to afford one for you just after few days or weeks of mining (depending on your power), or - since you can buy bitcoins now on mtgox without any problems, and because namecoins are really cheap, you can buy your own domain for less than 0.50USD. That is today's prices.

Anyway, I think that namecoins is the wave of the future to save us from any kind of censorship.

http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2011/05/12/namecoin-a-dns-alternative-based-on-bitcoin.html
http://mtgox.com/ - get bitcoins BTC here
http://exchange.bitparking.com/ - buy namecoins NMC here
http://bitcoinwatch.com/

sure that's blatant ad. But I think namecoins are really going to help here.

So people are actually giving you cash money for your bitcoins?

No, I never bought in to it. I should have though, when it was still easy to grab these intrinsically worthless pieces.

To see that there are people working their ass off to exchange acceptable money for digital nothingness, just look here:

https://mtgox.com/trade/buy

You can actually plonk down real money to get these silly signed computer files.

By the way, you do know the coins weren't just stolen from some random rich account holder like Mt Gox originally claimed, right? They were essentially created from thin air by a hacker that'd gained write access to the DB. If they hadn't shut things down promptly it's likely they'd have ended up not actually having enough real bitcoins to cover everyone's bitcoin balances; that's also why they insisted on rolling back the trades.

This was obvious for a while because half a million bitcoins were sold and based on examining the public record in the blockchain they didn't seem to actually have that many, but they did admit it in the end. It's fairly clear they must've known all along too; there's no way they could honestly have claimed that it was just a single account's bitcoins that were stolen and that they had enough bitcoins to cover their deposits.

What you describe is not a pyramid scheme, it is a run on the bank. That is precisely what Bitcoin is going through.

No, that's what Mt. Gox will go through when they come back on line, and there's a scramble to get money out. We're about to find out if Mt. Gox really has all the funds on deposit with them.

Mt. Gox customers are screaming on forums about getting a message from Mt. Gox that says "The password for this account is invalid, or this account is not currently under claim process."

e-Gold was shut down in 2009, and the claims process still hasn't released funds.

I have an Mt.Gox account but have never actually used it for anything. I received the following e-mail earlier today.

Dear Mt.Gox user,

Our database has been compromised, including your email. We are working on a
quick resolution and to begin with, your password has been disabled as a
security measure (and you will need to reset it to login again on Mt.Gox).

If you were using the same password on Mt.Gox and other places (email, etc),
you should change this password as soon as possible.

For more details, please see this:

https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20208066-huge-bitcoin-sell-off-due-to-a-compromised-account-rollback

The informations there will be updated as our investigation progresses.

Please accept our apologies for the troubles caused, and be certain we will do
everything we can to keep the funds entrusted with us as secure as possible.

The leaked data includes the following:

- Account number
- Account login
- Email address
- Encrypted password

While the password is encrypted, it is possible to bruteforce most passwords
with time, and it is likely bad people are working on this right now.

Any unauthorized access done to any account you own (email, mtgox, etc) should
be reported to the appropriate authorities in your country.

Thanks,
The Mt.Gox team

Gmail also flagged suspicious failed login attempts on my e-mail account, so I had to go through a password reset process on it. Although I used a unique password at Mt.Gox, the attacker apparently is running automated login attempts using the stolen e-mail addresses and Mt.Gox passwords, so anyone using non-unique passwords is likely in trouble.

Update: The main "BitCoin exchange", Mt. Gox, gives no information about the business entity behind the exchange, not even an address. The site has only "Tibanne Co. Ltd. (Japan)", which is an ISP in Tokyo.

Mt. Gox is a depository institution - you have to deposit BitCoins to sell them, and after the trade, you now have credit in some currency with Mt. Gox. Then you have to get the money out of Mt. Gox. The withdrawal process is slow. Also, on one forum, there's the comment from a Mt. Gox staffer (?) "If we have a lot of LR activity (like, about now), withdraws will be put on hold and executed later (ie. the next day) in the order they were received." That just screams "Ponzi scheme". They're an exchange; if they're honest, they should never have a cash flow problem.

The more I look at the BitCoin financial infrastructure, the more it looks like the High Yield Investment Program scams. Multiple offshore entities, withdrawal limits, unexpected delays in payouts, anonymous businesses. HYIP schemes are notable for being difficult to cash out of. They have to be, because they're Ponzi schemes.

https://mtgox.com/trade/history (click "all time")

In two months, the value per Bitcoin has increased from .5 USD to 20 USD, a 40 fold increase. Slashdot is being flooded by bitcoin speculators to increase prices. People are paying $20 for something worth 50 cents for no good reason. The price will collapse to less than $1 in the near future. People are throwing money away.

Right now mining is profitable since the value of bitcoins has recently gapped up from a buck to $7. But as more people mine, the algorithm must solve harder mining problems so in the longer term it is a self-regulating process. I have contemplated giving it a shot. To make a profit you have to build the machines as cheaply as possible and also live in an area with very cheap electricity.

As a side note, the whole affair is a big waste of resources, just like gold mining. However, it's this intrinsic cost to create the currency that makes it sound money - as opposed to fiat money, which can be made at no cost to the person authorized to print it.

That's not the total number of transactions, just the number which have not yet been confirmed (integrated into the block chain). Note that all of the transactions which include an offer of a transaction fee (typically 0.01 BTC) to the miner which incorporates the transaction into a block occurred within the last 20 minutes (one block ago, on average), and all but one of the remainder occurred within the last hour.

Over the past 30 days, over 4.2 million USD and 1,066,094.21 BTC were exchanged via https://mtgox.com/, one of the main trading sites. While still small compared to the currency exchange market as a whole, that's hardly reminiscent of anything you'll find in a high school.

You don't need to log in to see that Mt. Gox uses Dwolla:

https://mtgox.com/users/addFunds
https://www.dwolla.com/default.aspx
http://www.dwolla.org/help/the-famous-faq-section/

And boy how making up a user name and password sure does put that user name and password at risk.

I've read that PayPal and Visa have shut down a bunch of BTC exchanges. Google points me to Mt. Gox as the most popular one, but I couldn't find terms of service listed anywhere on the site before signing up. How are USD accounts on BTC exchanges typically funded?

Boy, it's really bad. Sad because bitcoin was a good concept, but the execution has been terrible. Just look at a chart of the USD/bitcoin exchange rate over the last year or so:

https://mtgox.com/trade/history

This asset has "gone parabolic", i.e. experienced an exponential increase in relative value. Like silver did just before coming crashing down the other week. I realize that during that time the US dollar has decreased in value marginally relative to other currencies and more significantly relative to commodities, but this sort of instability in value relative to one of the most significant baseline currencies (and therefore, relative to any other currency or even relative to hard assets like gold) doom bitcoin to me.

It's clear that bitcoin was set up in a way to promote massive early speculation in bitcoin. The awarding of a fixed amount of bitcoin per unit time regardless of the amount of resources being devoted to bitcoin mining has now created a situation where those mining before have an excess of an asset they need to pawn off on some greater fools, and where mining bitcoin is essentially worthless because there is so much competition for a small number of bitcoins awarded per unit time. As a result, bitcoin has simply become an arbitrary asset to speculate on - like a super-silver, but with no industrial use and no jewelry applications.

To show how worthless this is as a currency, in a 48-hour timeframe according to that same chart linked to above, the exchange rate has varied between $8 per bitcoin and $6.60 per bitcoin (i.e. it has lost almost 20% of its value in 48 hours). During the same 48 hour period, in one of its highest volatility phases in decades, silver has changed in value by about 5-6%, and gold by about 1% in US dollar terms.

The US dollar is imperfect in many ways, but there's a bunch of smart economists that work to create some relative stability in its value in terms of goods and services it buys so that it's useful as a currency, can be invested to generate returns, loaned out, or exchanged for goods and services.

The more I see of this, the less likely I would ever be to use bitcoin for anything. The value is too unstable and the management of the bitcoin economy too poor.

Any doubts about the cashing out of early adopters that made cheap and easy coin (bitcoin launched 10 months ago, when did you first hear about it?), go to the exchange and click on depth-of-market. There are several sellers offering lots of 1000+ coin (at $7-8 each). Clearly the winners are those who got in early, either mining with no competition or buying the currency eight months ago for 1/100 of it's current value...

Each hour approximately six computer in the world win a prize of 50 coin (based on cpu resources dedicated to solving an increasingly complex math crypto problem), but with the current number of people running the coin mining apps now, it currently would take an average computer years to win 50 coin.

It also seems like some big player or pool is gaming the system by turning their massive compute power on and off. Maybe they've found out how to manipulate the difficulty for max profit before it is recalculated?

For the articles it looks like you can trade US dollars for bitcoins and bitcoins for us dollars. And that the $7.70 you put in two days ago is worth $7.10 today.

Same as with any other currency, the rate goes up and down - but historically, it has gone up more than down, so if you had bought bitcoins three years ago and kept them around, you'd get 10x as much as you paid by selling them today.

Man, if you just RTFA you'd find much bigger BS targets:

Bitcoins are created by a complex algorithm. Only 21M can be made by the year 2140. Your desktop bitcoin software can make bitcoins, but at this point the electricity and time it would take to produce a bitcoin is larger than the actual value of a bitcoin (your laptop might take five years to make one, and they currently trade at $6.70 per bitcoin [ see https://mtgox.com/trade/buy for the latest exchange rate ].

Bitcoin miners use super cheap GPUs (not CPUs) to create the coins, but as more people come online to make them, the algorithm adjusts so that one block can only be made every 10 minutes.

O.K. - logically, what algorithm would prevent duplicate hardware from making duplicate coins in 2 locations at one time? If there's no central authority, how is the one block every 10 minutes rule enforced? How will your prostitute hiring iPhone know the difference between a coin "mined" on one piece of hardware from another?

But what is a coin worth? It seems like the "mining" process is compute intensive, but the "coins" effectively come from nowhere. (although you certainly will have to pay for the energy required to power your computer while it was mining... doesn't seem very "green" to me...) How is the value of a coin determined, and how stable is the value?

It is an interesting project, and I am genuinely curious...
Thanks

Just like any currency, it's worth whatever people are willing to trade it for. Here's a service that will sell you a Bitcoin for $7.84 as I write, which they claim is market value. I don't endorse that site, by the way -- it's the first one Google gave me.

The anticipation is that market forces will cause the value of a bitcoin to settle at a level where it's worth just slightly more than what it costs to "mine", if you have a very efficient operation. Hence for most people it will make more sense to trade goods, services, or other currencies for bitcoins, than to mine.

There are already people using it in earnest. Whether they're a lot cleverer than the rest of us, or quite the opposite, I really don't know.

If you'd bought a bunch of Bitcoins in February, and sold them to day, you'd have multiplied your investment by nearly 8...

1 Bit Coin is currently trading for around $7.

https://mtgox.com/

If anybody is interested you can purchase bitcoins through https://mtgox.com/

Your exchange volume would be incredibly low.

Mtgox's current volume is 38492
http://www.mtgox.com/trade/history

The exchange volume on the mtgox exchange is currently 57239. So a bit more than 2 people.

See ref: http://www.mtgox.com/trade/history

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency that is fairly cash-like. It was discussed on Slashdot in July.

The exchanges are currently trading one bitcoin for US$0.27, way up on $0.06 around the time of the slashdot article (charts are here).