Can somebody please tell me what these are? Austin is getting the first bitcoin ATM machines for SXSW.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/02/19/bitcoin-atm-austin/5623387/
After reading this article I am even more confused.
Bitcoins started as a way to hide purchases on the Internet. Some file sharing services made you buy Bit Coins and then you used those instead of a credit card. The coins were near impossible to track, unlike a credit card. Entire bogus sites were set up for the sole purpose of funneling undetectable money. It was cryptocurrency. There is no central bank and it was peer to peer.
The first major entity to use Bitcoin was Wikileaks for donations and in 2012 over 1,000 merchants use Bitcoin.
It is changing and that is thanks to a Texas judge, who ruled Bitcoin as "currency and a form of money" and as such can be controlled and regulated. Two things then happened. Since it was ruled currency, it gained instant value, but since it was regulated, it could be tracked. In June the DEA seized over 11.2 billion Bitcoin. It was the first time a government seized Bitcoin currency.
In late 2013 a university and two Vegas casinos said they would start accepting Bitcoin. The real issue with Bitcoin is how volital the currency has become. In one day, April of 2013, the currency was at $250 then slid to $50 and then back to $100. It is literally all over the map in terms of value. Still the spikes are all upward, from a one cent in 2010 to over a $1000 in Jan of 2014.
and..it's still hard to track.
