Bitcoin is no joke. Baidu now supports the market. There are ATM dispensers of real cash in exchange for Bitcoins transferred from your cyber "wallet". What drives the seriousness of the mechanism is that an increased number of "believers" can "mint" new Bitcoins. Those with the will and ability to maintain the mechanism are said to "mine" new wealth and this is clearly addictive to certain kinds of people. It is an interest that pays.

Over the past week or so, a person could earn about 0.0001 Bitcoins (maybe 1 yuan at the current exchange rate) in one hour of expert "mining". But given that addicts spend their waking hours at this and that speculation is driving value up, it beats unemployment.

The individual launching Bitcoin is unknown, except through the thorough planning of the venture and a ps

That single fact spells out in large fonts that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme in which the first wave of players makes money and leaves the base of the pyramid to collapse. Clinton Dines, one of China's expatriate community's respected business leaders who has been in China for 34 years, merely mutters the previous testimonies to human greed and folly: the Dutch "tulip mania" of four centuries ago when a single tulip bulb from Turkey promised wealth such that it was equal to years of income, and the English "South Sea Bubble" of three centuries ago, pretending England would colonize South America.