Art Blog - Bitcoin – The saviour of underground art?

"Strangely I did not find any silk on the Silk Road website"

Bitcoin is a new online currency so baffling, so intangible that you would be forgiven for thinking it cannot possibly be real. Bitcoin is a cyber-currency with no government backing and no central bank. How real is bitcoin? Type into Google ‘bitcoin to dollar exchange rate’ and you will get an answer. Or simply look at the graph below: bitcoincharts.com Bitcoin uses the same principles of p2p technology as the ubiquitous bit torrent, instead of sharing bits of data that make up music files it shares currency information on transactions. Everything is encrypted ensuring complete anonymity, it is completely decentralised and has no transaction fees. Bitcoin’s potential is huge; it could perhaps bring a new era of trade and a new era of prosperity for many of the world’s poorest nations. In many ways it shares characteristics with good old fashioned hard cash, it isn’t recor...

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