Very interesting. I've always been interested in virtual currencies (and virtual countries, anyone remembe freedonia?) but as the author mentions they've mostly fallen prey to money launderers. I think it's an interesting experiment to limit the money supply, it gives you an incentive to get involved _right now_. I'll be trying it out, anyone else?
I tried running it for a while on my laptop while at home. Let it run for a week, didn't see a single coin. Calculated how long it would take to generate one on average, concluded that it wouldn't be worth it. There is teraflop GPU at work at the moment which is completely fallow, and I might be able to get some bitcoins out of that, but that would be misappropriation of resources. (It's not true, as the article claims, that generating bitcoins uses fallow resources. Computing those hashes burns a lot of juice...)
It would be interesting to calculate the current cost per bitcoin, in terms of electricity used to generate them (and hey, perhaps the quantity of CO2 produced too!).
