In case you’ve never heard of them, Bitcoins are a decentralized digital currency based on peer-to-peer Internet connections. The Bitcoin system relies heavily on cryptography and has a nifty feature where the transaction log is stored by everyone so that transactions can be verified by a safety-in-numbers approach. Also, it takes computational “work” to update the transaction log (called a block chain), so forgery is difficult and becomes impossible the more time passes after a transaction. It’s quite clever – you can read more about it on the Bitcoin Wiki page. Continue reading →