Bitcoin Forum

I'm new around here, so please help me understand how much of a real bitcoin economy there is.

By 'real', I mean productive, creative activities that grow the economy.

I'm seeing a lot of currency trading, which is a zero-sum activity.

I'm also seeing a lot of Ponzi/pyramid and gambling games (not that there's anything wrong with that), but you'd have a pretty shitty economy if that's your main product.

It seems like we'd need a significant ecosystem of value-producing activity, real goods and services denominated in bitcoin, before bitcoin can graduate to a more mainstream currency.

Aside from Silk Road, how does anybody have an estimate of the 'GDP' of the bitcoin economy?

Actually, what you see is the most visible part of the economy. That skew perception quite a bit.

For example, I pay my 3 employees every week for content produced. In turn, I also work a small job in which I produce content for some other guy.

However, these economic relationships are invisible to see for the average users. They just see my magazine and have interesting articles to read, along with an advertising banner on the top of each page.

Thanks @kiba.  I was hoping there was more to the bitcoin economy than what I'm seeing in the forum.

There's some productive activities at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade but they seem to be pretty small.  It's good to know you're doing routine transactions with bitcoin and producing real stuff.

Zero-sum activites like forex and pyramid games are fine, but they're not going to grow the bitcoin economy or extend it beyond the speculator set.

being a new sort of currency it will take a wile to catch on in the main stream. but the future of bitcoin is anyone's guess.

Bitcoin as a currency is a great idea...the Bitcoin economy is what people make of it.

Not really. A few novelty items, some tech stuff, that's it.
Bitcoin is still a young project and the tools to use bitcoin are only just being built. Think of the early days of the internet, many people did no see the potential then came Tim Berners-Lee. It was the layers built on top of the net that changed everything, the same will be true of bitcoin. Exchanges may be zero sum but they are an important foundation stone. As their are no barriers to entry things will snowball very quickly when the basic services are a little more mature.

I disagree, I think there are plenty of things that can be bought for coins.  The Trade section in the wiki is so long as to be unusable these days.  Check out thebitcoinlist.com (http://thebitcoinlist.com) or similar aggregators of bitcoin merchants.  You can also check out sites like bitgigs.com on which people post services their willing to perform for coins.  The list of things you CAN'T buy with coins is shrinking every day.