I've been involved by a friend into his attempt at understanding how Bitcoins works.

I had only heard of Bitcoins before and assumed it was a Paypal-like service. I was wrong. After reading about it in the last couple of days, I am impressed at the system both from the technical point of view (it is, in a way, a distributed-computing system, a la SETI), and from the economics (it does take some more than basic knowledge of Money Supply theories to design a system like this).
And, I am so curious about the mystery of its origins.

So, I thought someone here knows about Bitcoins, maybe, and wants to share some thoughts? After all, this is the Empeg BBS, somebody must know for sure