It’s getting easier for consumers to buy and spend bitcoin, the cybercurrency that has captured much of the tech world.

With each passing month, entrepreneurs are rolling out new technology for consumers to buy and store bitcoin, shop online with the virtual currency and send it to friends. Last week, a bitcoin ATM was unveiled in Mountain View, Calif. — put in a few hundred bucks, out comes a bitcoin. And more retailers — from consumer electronics to coffee roasters and pizza delivery — are accepting bitcoin, making it easier for consumers to choose the Internet currency over dollars.

“It’s all about to change over the next 12 to 24 months,” said Marshall Hayner, a San Francisco entrepreneur who this month will launch bitcoin app QuickCoin. “We are going to see all kinds of people adopt it. It’s going to power transactions on the Internet.”

Bitcoin is a cybercurrency and payments network created in 2009 by a mathematical formula as an alternative to banks and government-controlled currency systems. Bitcoins are added one at a time to the network by computer programmers around the world, and most bitcoins are bought and traded on global Internet exchanges.

The bitcoin community is filled with entrepreneurs and investors pouring millions of dollars into their projects. But for the rest of us, still buying with cash and plastic, bitcoin is a bit of a mystery.

“You’ve got people out there who are software engineers who don’t understand it,” said Vinny Lingham, co-founder of Gyft, a San Francisco digital gift card app that accepts bitcoin. “It’s far too complicated out there for the average consumer to understand. But that will change.”

Other retailers accepting bitcoin: consumer electronics retailer TigerDirect, handmade goods seller Etsy, online gaming company Zynga and electric car company Tesla. There are no bank-imposed transaction fees like there are with credit cards, and some merchants, including Gyft, are passing the 3 percent to 5 percent savings on to the consumer.

New sites launching this month make it easier to shop online with bitcoin or send money to your friends. The QuickCoin app lets you send bitcoin directly to people on Facebook, and Santa Cruz, Calif.-based PayStand, which launched last week, allows consumers to shop from 2,000 retailers using bitcoin. Square, the San Francisco mobile payments company, said last week it would start accepting bitcoin on its online marketplace, Square Market.

As the number of bitcoin websites and apps grow, so does the bitcoin culture. In February, San Francisco held its first bitcoin fair, a festival of music, food, beer and arts vendors all accepting bitcoin.