Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency. Peer-to-peer (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or keep track of transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. Advantages:

Transfer money easily through the Internet, without having to trust middlemen.

Third parties can’t prevent or control your transactions.

Bitcoin transactions are practically free , whereas credit cards and online payment systems typically cost 1-5% per transaction plus various other merchant fees up to hundreds of dollars.

, whereas credit cards and online payment systems typically cost 1-5% per transaction plus various other merchant fees up to hundreds of dollars. Be safe from the instability caused by fractional reserve banking and bad policies of central banks. The limited inflation of the Bitcoin system’s money supply is distributed evenly (by CPU power) throughout the network, not monopolized by the banks.

Bitcoin is an open source project created by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is currently in beta development stage. Bitcoin development is hosted at SourceForge.

Screenshots:

Using Bitcoin:

Turn on Options->Generate Coins to get a few coins by helping to run the network. Bitcoin runs in the background when your computer is idle and should not slow down other programs. It may take days to successfully generate a coin, so be patient. The timing varies and depends on how much idle CPU time you contribute.

The total eventual circulation of Bitcoins will be 21,000,000 coins. There will never be more coins than that. The coins are entering circulation gradually, at a steady pace over many years, to nodes supporting the network in proportion to the CPU time they contribute.

To receive incoming connections, you need to set your firewall to forward port 8333 (TCP) to your computer. This increases the number of nodes you can connect with.

Bitcoin can be used through Tor with the command line:

bitcoin -proxy=127.0.0.1:9050

If you're trying to remain anonymous (pseudonymous, really), be careful not to reveal any information linking your bitcoin addresses to your identity. You should use a new bitcoin address for each payment you receive.

Downloads:

Download Bitcoin 0.3.2 for Windows (exe) (5.2MB)

Download Bitcoin 0.3.2 for Windows (zip) (5.1MB)

Download Bitcoin 0.3.2 for Linux (32-bit & 64-bit) (8.7MB)

Download Bitcoin 0.3.2 for Mac OS X (10.5+ Intel) (13.4MB)

SHA1 bce706477154f81813cebab2c7c5d370636ffbe0 bitcoin-0.3.2-win32-setup.exe

SHA1 891b1e33e0306e6922c08c8339721a842e23aff8 bitcoin-0.3.2-win32.zip

SHA1 11e85f29eec76817a3e4c8d82854219a97f27a0e bitcoin-0.3.2-linux.tar.gz

SHA1 ae6d87723318c18c93249acb5b23f18ebcbed06d bitcoin-0.3.2-macosx.zip

