What does everyone think about the new phenomenon that is cryptocurrencies? I think it is amazing, and potentially the future of currency, and and at the very least an extremely convenient method of purchasing and selling goods online.
Bitcoin, for example, is decentralized, has extremely low transaction fees(flat fee), highly secure, and anonymous. Paying with a credit card exposes you to risk of credit card fraud as anyone with your credit card number needed for payment can steal it, however with bitcoin you have a private key that is next to impossible to reverse engineer, so you're practically safe. Credit cards also have large transaction fees, which means by purchasing goods with bitcoin you can save. The fact that it is decentralized, meaning no one controls it, helps prevent it from being abused by governments, and it's also impossible to counterfeit.
Many places have begun to accept bitcoin. There are a lot of small businesses that accept it, and many major corporations are considering it. For Gyft allows you to purchase gift cards for many major stores like target and a lot of restaurants at a 3% discount when you pay with bitcoin. I haven't used it, but I hear it works great.
I've been mining litecoin and making ~$5 a day worth of it, and trading it for bitcoin. Just leaving my computer on I'm earning a large amount of currency since I have a nice Radeon 7870 GPU. Saved up like $60 worth so far in the past week, it's awesome. Hoping the value continues to rise like it has been, hoping to get rich off of it xD