Luckily there's plenty of bitcoin exchanges. The easiest one to use if you're in america is coinbase. No need to do money orders with them, unless you want to, then use campbx instead. The one thing most people complain about is how long it takes to get their bitcoins, or their money from selling bitcoins. Bitcoin transactions are not instantaneous. It takes some time for transactions to propogate through the bitcoin network before bitcoins get to their destination. The area of selling bitcoins and getting your money back also takes time. Wiring money to an exchange takes a while, and a bank ach transfer takes a while too. People use to be able to buy with credit cards, but this practice was mostly stopped with scammy people doing charge backs with the credit card since bitcoin is not possible to perform a charge back (receive your new bitcoins and get your money back). It's why paypal and google wallet don't deal with bitcoin. Link a bank account, or money order. The fastest way i could find to sell and buy bitcoins was localbitcoins.com. However, it was easier buying bitcoins a long time ago. It's harder to buy them today, especially if you're in america.
For the recent market with bitcoin has been pretty interesting. The silk road take down did make bitcoin more popular by giving it more exposure to people via news (which drove more people to use it). Then china got into the action and was a very big part with increasing the value (which got even more people to use it). China's bitcoin exchange became big very fast surpassing mt gox. The one thing that we all should be careful with here is that it is still a new currency. It's still maturing, it's still being adopted, it's still normalizing. Or, it's in a bubble and will crash. That however doesn't get rid of the fact that it's still a new currency that's maturing and being adopted for use (this is in no way saying that bitcoin can't crash). People that have bitcoin, and new people that just got some, sort of don't exactly know how to think of the currency. It's good for buying stuff on the internet, but should it be invested like a hedge, and how long will the profitability of selling bitcoins last? Luckily people do make money by buying and selling different currencies based on exchange rate and arbitrage selling. Investing in bitcoin like a hedge, really just has yet to be seen (in my own opinion, i'd call doing that a mistake, there's better hedges to invest in).
The really cool news on the evolution of bitcoin:
Bitcoin has more or less been evolving in the area of how to store it. It has gotten to the point of being able to go back and forth from intangibility to tangibility. We all have probably heard of casacius physical bitcoins. Not a good way to buy bitcoin, and only buy from the maker (people selling these on ebay have a very high chance of selling an "unused" coin that actually is used and you just bought an over priced bitcoin container that's empty). Casacius coins are more or less about increasing popularity of bitcoin with collectible novelty coins. Casacius coins can also physically be cracked with a seringe and some kind of polymer that doesn't degrade the glue on the sticker of these coins. After cracking a casacius bitcoin is when you ship to that poor sucker on ebay who bought it
The better way is printing your own bitcoin bills, a practice of maintaining a paper wallet. It's also the most secure way to store your bitcoins (removes having any digital wallet get hacked).
This more or less explains how bitcoin bills work. Now, you can print these out on your own sheets of plain paper if you want. Or, you can use the coinbase export to paper wallet (how cool of coinbase to do this yesterday btw). Or you can get
these nifty bills to shove through a printer if you really wanted something nice i guess.
Now, one area of bitcoin that i have not cared for hearing whatsoever, is that it's only used for buying illegal stuff, and only used by criminals. This is true to a point, just like cold hard cash. The bitcoin system is great because of how it operates by getting rid of any third party to handle money between buyer and seller (paypal, western union, etc.). Bitcoin is the digital equivalent of handing cash over to the seller and the seller handing over the goods (except through the internet). The main thing about criminals and buying illegal stuff is that there's always the use of cash to leave less of a paper trail (the taliban isn't going to use a debit card to buy a nuke). All criminals use cold hard stacks of cash in this manner. Before bitcoin came along, in my country and around the world, the american dollar was used for the same thing if you were a bad bad person doing bad bad stuff (american bills are still popular). In reality any cash is used in this manner. People not wanting to use bitcoin because of this stigma that only bad people use it is retarded. That's like people not wanting to buy cd-r/rw's because only pirates burn music cd's and sell them at a profit. If having bitcoin makes you be seen as a criminal...well, having cash does the same thing. Fud is fud in this case.
