With this weeks lawless governmental attacks on Wikileak and free speech, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can not be trusted to handle money transactions. A blog post from Simon Phipps on bitcoin reminded me about a project that a friend of mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get involved with BitCoin. I got some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon for helping me remember BitCoin.
So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas will get the package into Debian soon.
Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR. There are companies accepting bitcoins when selling services and goods, and there are even currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare, you can even get some for free (0.05 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use BitcoinWatch to keep an eye on the current exchange rates.
As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to the address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b. Thank you!