Wow, I just learned about bitcoins and I have to say they are very clever. Their brilliance is in that they play to the urge to collect in humans.
You run the software and makes bitcoins for you. Almost like earning money in your sleep. And of course once you have "earned" these bitcoins by installing the software you have a psychological inclination to assign actual value to them.
Of course like most things academic it falls flat on its face on execution. My software did not work. I had to spend half an hour diving through forums and wikis to find some obscure command line argument that may make it work, although I am still not sure it is working properly. Of course 99% of ordinary people would have just given up.
So the folks at bitcoin have ensured that only persistent nerds like me use their service.
All I did was download the client and run it. It "just worked" for me without doing any special on either Linux or Windows (XP). This was with the current version 0.3.19.
You run the software and makes bitcoins for you. Almost like earning money in your sleep. And of course once you have "earned" these bitcoins by installing the software you have a psychological inclination to assign actual value to them.
Of course like most things academic it falls flat on its face on execution. My software did not work. I had to spend half an hour diving through forums and wikis to find some obscure command line argument that may make it work, although I am still not sure it is working properly. Of course 99% of ordinary people would have just given up.
So the folks at bitcoin have ensured that only persistent nerds like me use their service.