Bitcoin Forum

Just a random question, would you say the largest use of bitcoins is Silk Road, or are there other more popular uses i've never heard of?

more popular?  :D
i have no idea, just can speak for myself,
using bitcoins now for about 1.5years to buy stuff, sell stuff, make donations, i NEVER used silkroad and my guess is, that this is true for the majority of bitcoin users.
i'd say i'm very familiar with bitcoin, but i haven't even seen the silkroad website, i only heard and read about it in the news.

it's so so easy to point at silkroad to say "see? it's only used for illegal stuff"

Honestly, the largest use is probably still as an investment vehicle through the exchanges and the various funds here in the marketplace forum (bitpyramid, etc). There still aren't that many vendors bit it's getting better!

I've been actively using Bitcoin for about a year now, know about Silk Road (I tend to check it now and again to keep myself up to date), but it never appeared to me as being used by very many people. Granted though, it gained immense popularity after the "bad press" it caused, so I'm guessing it has a lot of active users nowadays.

Like others, I also guess Bitcoin is currently mostly being used for shuffling money between exchanges, investment vehicles, betting sites, etc. Uninteresting stuff. I don't think any of these is the majority use case though.

Looking at my wallet history, admittedly almost half the transactions are between me and pools/exchanges. The other half though, is pretty random. A few hundred coins for electronic equipment, another few hundred for services. A few transactions to/from friends. An unhealthy amount of donations. Very random purchases from the forum and auction sites.

Quite a bit of it seems to be people just shuffling money around to various pools, etc. I get the feeling that using bitcoins to purchase things isn't the majority of use.

Bitcoins can avoid high fees for international purchases as well as a degree of anonymity(if used properly) not afforded by credit cards. as such this makes them useful for unsavory or just embarasing purchases in addition to regular purchases of things such food, computer hardware, kitchen equipment and just about anything else

Mostly, I just do it for fun. It's something I can do on the side. I don't get involved with the GPU mining, and mostly I get my Steam games from people here :P .

probably investing to listed company on GLBSE

I'm not that into BitCoins yet but I read a lot about it.
What I would want to use it for is as a payment method for my web shop, but for that I need to learn how to make it anonymous for my buyers and myself.

Don't want random people to be able to track how much I sell and/or to who I sell it.

I think Bitcoins get taken and given as donations more than actual exchanges of goods or services.

Yes we need to find a way to improve the quality of goods and services which use bitcoin.  More people would be persuaded to use the currency.