That was my thought as well, except I think they have the potential to be a digital currency in the future. I may be reading into it too much, but how about this: the USD inflates to high hell because a few governments decide to move to gold or some other reserve currency. Since the Amazon coin is tied to the dollar, they take a beating along with everyone else. The guys at Amazon are pretty smart though, and what prevents them from deciding, "Ya know what? Starting today, our coins are no longer tied to the USD. They are now tied to..." (put in whatever you want there).

It gives them the flexibility to create a digital currency in the future, right? Granted, they control it completely so it's not something I'd personally be too excited about.

Thanks Monster Tent, I hadn't heard of that before. Interesting.

Probably not a coincidence these ideas are getting so much attention lately. Even Amazon is getting in on the game with their own coins.

Fun times. Now if only I had gotten into this a couple years ago...

I'm posting this mainly for fun (I'm still in Newbie jail and apparently need to post some stuff to get out). I've been researching bitcoin for a few weeks now and was thinking this morning, "Wow, bitcoin is so cool! It's a currency used all around the world!" (I was looking at some bitcoin maps last night)

That got me thinking... a global currency. The exact thing the New World Order conspiracy theorists claim is the "end game" of all their loosely related conspiracies from 9/11 to HAARP. Despite what we see here about Mr. Nakamoto's views on central banking (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto), what if he (it?) is really using bitcoin as a test bed for a global currency? With global concerns of hyper-inflation and currency wars, it makes sense to me for something like bitcoin to become successful. What if talk of the "sheeple" getting "chipped" just means their bitcoin private addresses will be implanted so they can't be stolen?

But... I digress. I can't seem to find my tin hat today. If that really was the case, they made a big mistake in giving up control of the system. For some organization to have global control via a single currency, they'd have to be able to expand and contract the liquidity of that currency to maintain control. Not sure that's possible with bitcoin.

Please proceed with your regularly scheduled whatever you were doing.

I'm a developer/co-founder of the ecommerce platform FoxyCart.com

We're very interested in bitcoin and are exploring supporting it within our shopping cart system. Since we're built by and for developers, I'm very interested in getting to know this community and how we might be able to help each other. I've been hanging out in #bitcoin and so far, I have to say, this community seems pretty awesome. Smart, rational, and full of technically-minded people.

My kind of crowd. :)

On Twitter at @lukestokes

I'm a newbie to Bitcoin and Litecoin. Learning about both. Here's a litecoin address: LQWJCCnD8hfGL5gD3uJCJNiUqAF7eVrNXL