As a game developer, the best value of bitcoin is that it is a hack-resistant and durable way to exchange currency.
Gold is nice, but we can make gold someday or someone can discover a bunch of gold somewhere and it all goes down.
The government backed value is good, but governments are controlled by people and they can be corrupt.
Other forms of tangible value is ok, but it suffers from all sorts of various problems that make them generally less good than gold ie. less elementally stable, too fragile, too common, etc.
The way bitcoins works from my understanding is that:
1. Anyone can make a bitcoin if they find a pattern that matches a description of a bitcoin.
2. Bitcoins are traded publicly with ledgers distributed. If you trade your bitcoin 1075 to me, there will be a record of that transaction on several servers around the world. This concept is perhaps similar to bittorrent.
The benefits to these two basic principles are mostly that which javert has stated.
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As a side note, there are a TON of services to get you started with bitcoin, today, for free. I feel that as a technologist, you should try it out.
Now, on a very personal note, I find bitcoins very interesting, but I don't believe it can reach its intended goals. Governments need to be able to track spending to tax and regulate. Bitcoins makes things like money laundering very easy. If bitcoin reaches any real scale it will be shut down, fast.
how are you proposing they shut it down? the best they could do is shut down the exchanges, but goven they are located in the UK, Japan, France, US, Russia etc then you cant get them all shut down and even if you could you can still do person to person trades and I am willing to bet that a decentralised exchange appears not long after the current exchanges are shut down.
Maybe the "first-world countries" will criminalize all use of Bitcoin as Bitcoin continues to rise and their currencies continue to deteriorate. Respectable citizens and companies will not be able to use it (without massive deception to avoid detection).
However, all the other countries will increasingly adopt Bitcoin.
In 25 years, there is a global economic renaissance, except the first-world countries of the past are now the dregs of the global economy.
so govt criminalises bitcoin (i would love to see the law that makes it illegal, is it illegal to own, mine, trade with?) how do they shut down a de-centralised network? localbitcoins allows you to buy and sell in person, tor sites could easily provide an exchange service and with the introduction of things like ripple finding other BTC users will get easier, so saying shut it down is easier than actually shutting it down. Plus if we have learned anything it is that a bitcoin clone can pop up next week, there are already litecoins, if the govt law banning BTC is so braod that it brings in all virtual currencies then poeple like Amazon (just starting their own) or Canadian National Bnak who are douing the same would also be affected, it would stifle innovation for the legal markets but the grey market would bloom in response.
Gold is nice, but we can make gold someday or someone can discover a bunch of gold somewhere and it all goes down.
The government backed value is good, but governments are controlled by people and they can be corrupt.
Other forms of tangible value is ok, but it suffers from all sorts of various problems that make them generally less good than gold ie. less elementally stable, too fragile, too common, etc.
The way bitcoins works from my understanding is that:
1. Anyone can make a bitcoin if they find a pattern that matches a description of a bitcoin.
2. Bitcoins are traded publicly with ledgers distributed. If you trade your bitcoin 1075 to me, there will be a record of that transaction on several servers around the world. This concept is perhaps similar to bittorrent.
The benefits to these two basic principles are mostly that which javert has stated.
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As a side note, there are a TON of services to get you started with bitcoin, today, for free. I feel that as a technologist, you should try it out.
1. Go to https://instawallet.org/ to get an address for others to send you bitcoins 2. Go to sites listed https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90718.0 and get some free bitcoins
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Now, on a very personal note, I find bitcoins very interesting, but I don't believe it can reach its intended goals. Governments need to be able to track spending to tax and regulate. Bitcoins makes things like money laundering very easy. If bitcoin reaches any real scale it will be shut down, fast.