"..is the currency of the resistance; informal markets of people, not corporations. It's a true global free market"

"..governments could lose control of individual state economies and people could live outside conventional financial and taxation systems. Banks could shut. In a capitalist society where everything has a fixed price, the cost of resistance could be high: Bitcoin's Young Turks seem set on a collision course with some powerful people who have a lot to lose.

"These people – states and established financial institutions – will move against Bitcoin because Bitcoin strikes at the root of current power structures," reckons Frank Braun, a German tech consultant and privacy advocate

I met the term for the first time when i visited "Dark/underground Internet" and was asked to pay using Bitcoin.

"..FinCEN is America's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – a bureau of the US Treasury which aims to counter money laundering. Last month it issued new guidelines to regulate "virtual currency" trading.

It could be the thin end of the wedge.

The White House has a score to settle: when the US piled pressure on Wikileaks in 2010 and 2011, it was to Taaki's "currency of the resistance" that the group turned when their conventional methods of banking were blocked. "Within a day their VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Swiss bank and Amazon accounts were closed," points out Taaki.

"Wikileaks was unable to continue soliciting donations – except through Bitcoin. It was their lifeline."

I had started trading in bitcoins using www.virwox.com sometime in june 2011, I quickly stopped keeping any of the coins after the first hack on mtgox. using www.virwox.com I could buy bitcoins from my paypal account ... bank account and keep them. I would later trade them... the overheads proved to be too much - so I stopped!

Bitcoin. Everybody’s talking about it. What’s true, and what’s hype? Perhaps the only thing that’s clear about Bitcoin is that it’s not going away anytime soon. Who am I to say? I’m not an economist; I’m a hacker, who has spent his career exploring and repairing large networks. And networks may very well be how the world works — financial, social, electronic, even physical.

I’m on neither “Team Bitcoin” nor “Team Global Financial System.” I’m on “Team Lets Fix This Thing.”

When Mining finishes, there will be a finite number of BTC yes? At that point, how will people earn bitcoins based on transactins?

Today, when a miner solves a block they get 25 btc + the transaction fees from all transactions in that block. In another four years the block reward will drop, and miners will get 12.5 btc + the transaction fees from all transactions in that block. This continues droppping the reward by half, so eventually the miners will get just the transaction fees from all transactions in that block.

You can go look at blockexplorer.com to see recent blocks and get an idea of how much transaction fees are being collected.

The more popular bitcoins becomes, the more transactions get put in each block, miners make more money. The higher the exchange rate, the transaction fees will be worth more and the miners will get more money.

Mining will never finish, the block subsidy will diminish to 0, but the transaction fees will continue. Block subsidy is new bitcoins entering the system, transaction fees on the other hand are bitcoins that were held by the person making the transaction. So while miners will still get paid to produce blocks, the number of bitcoins remains constant.