It's happening.

See those up there? Those are Bitcoins, a form of digital currency. That also means they're not *real* Bitcoins since real Bitcoins are actually digital...you get the idea.

Anyway, now take a look at the picture below.

Notice anything...odd? I saw this yesterday on the door of a small cafe on Decatur and I had to take a picture. You'll notice that under the list of credit cards they take, it shows they also take Bitcoin.

I predict we will see this much more often. Bitcoin is a digital currency earned through running algorithms on a PC known as mining. Solve the algorithm, earn some Bitcoin. It's a gross over-simplification, but that's essentially how it works. The hardware required to do this, in other words the computational cost, has been increasing as the algorithms have been becoming more complex, however the value of Bitcoins has been rising as well - last year a single Bitcoin was worth an all-time high of $1200. At the time of this posting, one Bitcoin is worth $533.

So disruptive has Bitcoin been, and so much has it become an economic force, that countries including Canada, the United States, and even Iran have suggested they will consider regulation, while others such as Jordan and Israel have warned against it, Germany will tax it as private money, England won't, and Japan has no plans to address it at all. Whether or not that is because of the spectacular collapse of Japanese Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox is unknown, but there is likely some influence there.

Thousands of places take bitcoin as payment, but not Amazon, which may be needed to truly make them mainstream.

There was also the very sad story about the poor guy who disposed of a hard drive containing around $9 million worth of Bitcoin in a landfill. That's because he mined the coins when it was a new hobbyist thing done by computer geeks, and not the global juggernaut it is now, and didn't realize their value.

As you can see, there is a lot going on with Bitcoin and while it is still the techie's domain, I suspect that will change in somewhat, but not very, short order.