Yes.

Huge part of my believe doesn't actually come from the bitcoin itself, but the disbelief of the current fiat-money and especially the banking system.

Banking system itself has so many negative things that are straightforwardly harming people and their usage of currency.

Just to mention a few:

• Slow as hell when transfering from one bank to another, at least one day in my country (+weekends)
• Your assets can be frozen at will
• The value of money is on hands of people I don't trust, such as politicians and officers of central banks

Those are just from top of my head and good enough reasons to want something better.

I do believe in bitcoin as a currency, but even more because it also works like a commodity. Most of all because of the potential that it holds. It's constantly evolving.

Not to mention the huge momentum around it: more and more people are learning about it, it's got extremely dedicated community and merchants are adapting it daily.

I do however consider the possibility of bitcoin failing in one way or another, but I firmly believe that cryptocurrencies will spawn some innovations that will in one way or another change the current, shitty system of money and banking.

Movie tickets.

It was the first purchase that I did and it was a huge experience as I realized how much superior Bitcoin really is.

When compared to logging to the banks website and filling all the necessary fields, it was liberating to just copy&paste the address and fill the amount.

Not to mention that if the person receiving the coins would have had different bank or if it would have been weekend, it could have taken several days for the transaction to be visible for the him.

There's a definite need for cryptocurrencies, as the current banking system is far from what you could expect with todays technology.

Altcoins do definitely have potential, but as they are now, their value is purely speculation.

Bitcoin has at least some (and growing) economy behind it, where people can actually exchange their coins for services and products. Still, I think that even in bitcoin most of the price and allure is also speculation, however the possibility of actually using the currency is pretty huge.

The potential of altcoins which I'm talking about comes from the fact that the bitcoin payment infrastructure is already there - that means that merchants have a lot lower threshold to adapt alt-currencies when there's need to.

To my knowledge (which isn't too much), china is still pretty protectionist when it comes to their citizens money. I remember hearing there being several similar virtual cash -startups this century, which I think got shut down by the government.

This might explain the popularity with bitcoin - there are several examples from other countries, where people would have loved to make earning online, but the currency restrictions were too strict. Bitcoin had solved those problems brilliantly for them.

In any case, China is definitely the force that will move bitcoins to even bigger heights and I don't really see the momentum stopping just yet. The potential there is huge.

Here are some interesting statistics about bitcoin clients downloaded.

The differences in prices are often linked to the difficulties in transfering FIAT money in and out of the exchanges.

For example, Mt. Gox is having (had?) a limitation how much they can send currency out per day - this made people buy more btc from their service rather than wait for their FIAT money to be delivered.

This resulted into Gox having bigger price in $/BTC than Bitstamp or other exchanges.

If money would move without problems between the services and their reputation are ok, people would use arbitrages very effectively.

There's always the chance of people losing trust to BTC-e, which would result into a premium price for people who dare to do business there - this is common on the markets where you can get something for cheap if you take more risk. By searching what is going on with each exchange, you will probably find relevant information why the price difference is so huge.

The point is, there's always a good reason why people are selling so much lower (or, buying higher) at one place. People don't let obvious arbitrages be there without taking advantage of them unless they have a good reason to.

When it comes to not knowing exactly who are behind services around Bitcoin, get used to it

I used BTC-e to change my LTC to BTC last spring, after that I don't really have any experience with it.

Weirdly enough, even though they have been around for a relatively long time, they still seem to have rather shady reputation around them - maybe because they originate from somewhere around Russia?

I honestly haven't heard that they would have scammed people, however you can never know when they decide to disappear from the web. It seems that they've got good thing going on, so I wouldn't expect them to do that as they've got a good source of money from legit business.

Personally, I wouldn't keep money/coins on their site any longer than necessary. If you can choose to use an exchange with better reputation, you may be more comfortable with using their services. As far as my personal experiences go, there's really nothing wrong with BTC-e. But before depositing money, it would be wise to do some digging of your own.