I just learned about a new "peer-to-peer currency" named Bitcoin. It also has a wiki.

It promises to be a currency that can be safely transferred over the internet with no central authority.

They have official Bitcoin client software, including a Linux version, code and binary. But I was hoping to get it from my trusty Fedora repository. But alas, yum search bitcoin yielded no match.

Has anyone installed this software?
Used Bitcoin to make a purchase or transfer funds?
Heard of it?

Frankly, by the time somebody packaged the client up for Fedora, the whole BitCoin market will have likely crashed. BitCoin is, at best, an unstable market heading for a brutal end; and at worst, a way for you to inadvertently fund illicit activities.

If you look into how the concept actually works, you will see that the whole scheme is unsustainable. The more BitCoins there are in circulation, the harder it becomes to create one, until it gets to the point that no more coins can be created. Already, it isn't even feasible to generate your own coins unless you are doing it on the GPU (CPU generation is now out of the question). Overall, BitCoin was very lucrative for early adopters (if you generated a few hundred when they were easy to do and sold them today, you could have made tens of thousands of dollars), but it is too late to get into it now.

Plus, all that aside, there aren't many places that actually accept BitCoins.

I do think that the idea of an Internet currency could work, but it doesn't look like BitCoin will be it.

Well that's kind of like gold. There's only so much of it on earth and that's it.

I fear your analysis may be right. But our governments have failed to give us a stable currency (quantatative easing anyone?). So it would be nice if something like this could provide a solution--a way to maintain currency that doesn't loose value just because someone prints more money.

You oppose illicit activities. Good. We should all oppose them. But we should also oppose government corruption.