I don't know how popular it is in other parts of the world, but in the UK The Register is quite popular among the IT community:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/So after reading The Wired thread I thought of The Register and figured I'd send this (loosely based on the email sent to Wired):
Hi Reg,
Just writing because I thought The Register might be interested in doing a story on a functioning cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. A cryptocurrency is a form of 'money' using a peer-to-peer network and public/private key encryption system to avoid the need for a centralized authority or single-point of failure to manage things like inflation, double spending, forgery and so on. It's like the bit-torrent of money.
Bitcoin is growing fast, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recognizes this electronic currency and accepts bitcoin donations. Bitcoin has been on the internet radio site "Security Now!", a national radio show at "One Radio Network", and has been written about twice now at "Slashdot.org" and in many, many blogs.
The bitcoin community comprises approximately 5,000 to 10,000 users so far and over 100 business. The forum community consists of linux geeks and cipher-freaks, coders and developers and economics enthusiasts and anarcho/libertarians of various stripes and many many other people from all walks of life who are simply fascinated by the idea of bitcoin, including myself.
The software for bitcoin is published under the MIT license. In addition to many other useful properties, bitcoin has extremely low transaction fees, high divisibility, and is difficult to produce and counterfeit. These features make bitcoin very useful as a medium of exchange.
Could bitcoin actually take off and become not just a commodity (as it already is), but an actual maintstream currency? Could bitcoin become a threat to centralized monetary systems which are backed by central banks and governments? It would be very interesting to see what The Register thinks.
If you could do a story on this open source software project I think many people would be interested. Here's the wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin, please visit the forums at bitcoin.org for additional info,
Regards, SumChancer.
