Reason I'm emailing is to tell you guys about Bitcoin, have you heard about it?
It's the greatest new currency, it's a completely decentralized and each user is their own bank. The fees for transferring money are VERY low, like 0.0005 BTC (about 1/2 of a US cent) to send an unlimited amount of money, including $1 million and up transactions, all carry the same transaction fee. The transaction fee is only there to curb spam in the network.
The transactions are completely irreversible by design. If someone sends you a bitcoin as payment, there is absolutely nothing they can do to try and get that back, unless you actually create a transaction of the same amount to them. 100% safe, unlike Paypal, credit cards, and bank transfers, where a higher power can actually reverse things. Not in Bitcoin.
One of the best ways to get started accepting bitcoin is to use a service like Bit-Pay.com, they are like the 'Paypal of Bitcoin', except WAY better as a service. It takes only a moment to create 'items' in inventory and put buttons on your website, then people can use bitcoin to pay for items, the users gets a receipt instantly and will have instant confirmation about their successful transaction. Bit-Pay has handled like a million dollars worth of pre-orders for the much anticipated Butterfly Labs ASIC devices in a very short window, and they handled the surge in traffic with ease. A unique feature about Bit-Pay is that you can choose to be paid in USD or one of many other currencies, so you can accept Bitcoin yet not actually hold any, and get paid in USD for your products. The transaction is just as safe as accepting bitcoin itself, because you do not stand any risk of being charge-backed and the user is not at any risk either.
Bitcoin is starting to get some great press, we just had this huge annoucement a few days ago about BitInstant's new Bitcoin Debit card, which you can load up with Bitcoins and spend them anywhere the Mastercard or Interac/Debit logos are shown (everywhere!) and your account is deducted in Bitcoin. This was all over the news, including CNN and... *drumroll*.. qq.com!! Look at this glorious article!!! ->> http://tech.qq.com/a/20120820/000117.htm
Technical details:
The amount of coins in circulation (remember this is a digital currency, not physical by design) will be reduced slowly over time, basically without any central authority or distributor, there still needs to be a way of getting the coins out there for people to use. Basically the bitcoin protocol spits out coins systematically at a set pace, and any user can get coins for free by leaving their computer running the 'mining' programs. Think of it like a big gold mine that only an exact measurable amount is mined every few minutes and anyone helping can have a share. If you had a computer set up in 2009, you would have gotten like 5000 BTC per day on 1 MH/s (megahash/second)... Today, you would probably get 0.15 BTC per day on 400 MH/s (you have 400 times the computing power but still earn 30,000 times less bitcoins), this is because there are SO many people mining in commercial mining farms and the global hashrate is MUCH higher than it once was. The protocol adjusts itself automatically every 2016 blocks (~ 2 weeks) to make the equation more or less difficult to solve, this is called 'difficulty.' It aims to have a block solved every 10 minutes, some are solved instantly, and some take much longer, it just depends on how lucky the miners get, but the better luck they have, the protocol just makes it harder.
Over time, the reward for mining gets reduced drastically, so that the supply gets smaller and the value is sure to increase. Right now, and since day one, the reward has been 50 BTC. If your computer happened to be hashing the exact solution to the current block, you get a 50 BTC reward, obviously you cannot get 0.15 BTC like my previous example, this is done by 'pooled mining' where you essentially mine in a team of other miners and you get a proportionate reward to how much work you put into finding the block, because it would otherwise take you months to get lucky enough to mine solo (unless you had massive computing power). On approximately December 3rd, 2012, the protocol will reduce the reward to 25 BTC per block. So half as many bitcoins per 10 minutes are produced. It halves the reward every 210,000 blocks, or 3 years. A person can expect a huge price hike of bitcoin in a couple months when this happens. In 3 years from then, the reward goes to 12.5 BTC per block, then 3 years later gets cut in half again, and so on. The absolute total maximum amount of bitcoins in circulation is 21,000,000, and right now there are 9,808,350 out there. So basically half of the coins are released, and in 3 years, it will be like 3/4, and so on. Over time, the more people that want to get involved with bitcoin, the higher the value of each bitcoin will be. Right now the value of all bitcoins combined is roughly $107,000,000 US, imagine all the money that is in this world of ours, how many billionaires out there? The more people buy bitcoins, it increases the value of everyone else's.
I could sit here and talk about bitcoin for hours.
Please forward this email to other people in China!!
Thank you for your time.
Any questions at all, don't hesitate to ask! I'm pretty knowledgeable in bitcoin.
Here's some links!
http://www.bitcoin.org/
http://www.bitcointrading.com/
http://www.bit-pay.com/
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page
https://btcchina.com/
http://www.cnbtcnews.com/
http://www.btc123.com/
http://www.hxtop.com/
https://bitcointalk.org/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101919.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=23746.0
http://www.weusecoins.com/
http://www.mtgox.com/
http://blockchain.info/
http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/
http://www.bitcoincharts.com/
http://btccharts.com/
http://www.bitcoinmonitor.com/
http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/
http://mtgoxlive.com/orders?dark
http://brainwallet.org/
https://glbse.com/
http://coinmill.com/BTC_CNY.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb0xHN1Dq7M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCJpJgyxKEg
http://casascius.uberbills.com/
