Bitcoin in Dollar kaufen

Turns out you can sell your Linden Dollars for Bitcoin,the virtual currency lots of people talk about (even though few of them use it as an actual currency),from within Second Life,where about 400, 000 people regularly use the virtual world's official money. Software engineer Sam Williams documents his experience of doing just that,via the Virtual World Exchange. It's pretty time-consuming:

In order to initiate the transfer,I had to visit one of VirWoX’s terminals inside Second Life,where I deposited L$5, 195. That’s me in the image above,with what appears to be some sort of cat behind me... The final step was simply to get the money out of my VirWoX account and into a bitcoin “wallet, ” a secure address that acts as my public identity on the bitcoin network. This turned out to be,by far,the most time-consuming step. After downloading the recommended bitcoin client,I needed to wait about five hours for it sync with the network.

And if I'm looking at the current exchange rates right,he lost a few dollars of value in the process:

I started the day with L$5, 203 in my Second Life account,which is worth about US$20... I executed a trade at an exchange rate of about 49, 000 Linden dollars for 1 bitcoin. VirWoX took a commission of L$50 plus 2.9% of the transaction. After a nearly instantaneous trade,I was the proud owner of one-tenth of a bitcoin,worth about US$18 at the time of trade.

So he's out a couple bucks. To be fair,exchanging between any two currencies almost always means losing some value in the process,if only through commission. But again,why sell a currency that hundreds of thousands of people find valuable,for a currency that... well,let Bitcoin's own community-run wikipedia page tell you the hard facts:

How many people use Bitcoin? This is quite a difficult question to answer accurately. One approach is to count how many bitcoin clients connected to the network in the last 24 hours. We can do this because some clients transmit their addresses to the other members of the network periodically. In September 2011 this method suggested that there were about 60, 000 users.

The old 2011 reference makes me suspect even less people are using Bitcoin now,or the Bitcoin community isn't interested in offering a more current figure -- neither of which insures much confidence.

Hat tip: