Bitcoin is a digital currency that’s been around since 2009, and has exploded in value in the past few months. Here’s a quick video of what exactly bitcoin is:

In December last year, I met up with my friend Steve of keepyourassets.net and freemarketincome.com and had a long discussion about Bitcoin. I had known about it for about a year and a half prior to this meeting. However, I was extremely skeptical of the whole concept and when the security breach with one of the online bitcoin exchanges, Mt Gox, happened in 2011, I wrote the whole thing off.

But I understood very little about why that was not indicative of the validity or stability of this currency.

Bitcoin itself is untouchable. It’s literally bits of information. It’s not controlled by central banks or any bureaucracy. No one can “take it down”. Governments can’t attack it (or like my friend Trace from runtogold.com likes to say, “they can’t point guns at a math equation”!), and no one can “print” bitcoins from thin air (like they are currently doing with the US dollar).