Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based anonymous 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. Anonymity means that the real world identity of the parties of a transaction can be kept hidden from the public or even from the parties themselves. Advantages:

  • Transfer money easily through the internet, without having to trust third parties.
  • Third parties can’t prevent or control your transactions.
  • Be safe from the unstability 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. Get the latest version of Bitcoin at the Sourceforge project page.

Screenshots:

Main window screenshot

Sending dialog screenshot

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.

Download Bitcoin 0.2 for Windows (exe) (3.1MB)
Download Bitcoin 0.2 for Windows (zip) (3.1MB)
Download Bitcoin 0.2 for Linux (2.4MB)

Note: If you have 64-bit Linux, the package ia32-libs needs to be installed.

SHA1 b8acb0008c5ce8a3c30f67491d7a85d1a7f73174 bitcoin-0.2.0-win32-setup.exe
SHA1 9efbdd7ba31989f477d3006b3b867942579c4695 bitcoin-0.2.0-win32.zip
SHA1 6ff749851e66801f2c82a199eec595d853c9fa8d bitcoin-0.2.0-linux.tar.gz