bitcoins 3 okay. so i bought some bitcoins. kinda just for fun. buying bitcoins is not for the faint of heart. the "easy" way is to go to a website like tradebitcoin.com. find an anonymous person in your area. contact them. negotiate a price. make a date. meet up with them. hand them cash(!). give them your account number. get your bitcoins. voila! easy peasy. okay that might feel a little sleazy. and not appeal to the less anarchy type. upstanding law abiding citizens such as myself might want to do things the "hard" way. first, open a bank account. i used the bank where i have a mortgage. cause i can get an account that has no fees or minimum balances. which is kinda nice. i made sure to not get the overdraft protection. you do not want someone to be able to withdraw money from the account when there's no money there. you're going to give your account number to an internet company. you think it's not a fly-by-night operation. but you never know. new accounts can be created online. but make sure you get your routing number and account number. i did it in person. i moved $100 into this account from my real bank account. okay second, open an account on dwolla.com. add the bank account to the dwolla account. wait three days. they will verify your bank account is real by depositing a few cents into it. after that goes through, tell dwolla how much they deposited. now they trust you are who you say you are and not some fly-by-night operation. now transfer money to the dwolla account from your bank account. wait three days. you'll see the money disappear from your bank account very quickly. but it won't show up in your dwolla account for the full three days. third, open an account on an exchange like mtgox.com. transfer money from dwolla to mtgox. wait a day. which is actually pretty fast in comparison to the bank thing. fourth, buy some bitcoins. i bought 6 at market price. course it's not clear that there's a charge for this of about 1%. so i actually got 5.96 in my mtgox account. now transfer the bitcoins from mtgox to your wallet. wait about a minute for the coins to show up. unconfirmed. you can wait 1-60 minutes for them to get their first confirmation. but for the most part, the bitcoins are now yours. congratulations. it took me 10 days to go through the whole painful process start to finish. much of which was moving us dollars. moving the bitcoins in comparison, really was as slick and painless as advertised. it'd be nice if this currency catches on. at least enough to make the banks improve their service. hoo-yah.  ¶ 8:00 AM