I recently stumbled upon Bitcoin, which is a digital currency enabling (among other things) anonymous money transfers without any central control.
Given your point of view that can either be a very good or a very bad ting.
Often an economy outside control or regulation of regular society is associated with criminal activities. But as was shown when the big credit card companies and PayPal (and others) turned off Wikileaks ability to receive funding (even though no court had ruled Wikileaks illegal), a currency with these attributes seems to have some justification.
Anyway, since the technology exists, my opinion for or against is really irrelevant. It is out there, and can’t really be shut down (without shutting down mostly the entire internet, or installing government spy-ware on each and ever computer in use today).
For details about the technical implementation or the economical aspects of Bitcoin I will refer you to the Bitcoin faq, but so far what I’m really missing is places to actually pay with Bitcoin.
The few places that do accept Bitcoin just aren’t enough, so for now the technical aspects are what fascinates me, but if the project takes off, shopping with Bitcoin in the future doesn’t seem to unrealistic.
If anyone out there know of any great sites that use Bitcoin today (besides the ones listed on the Bitcoin homepage) or have great ideas for some places where Bitcoin could be useful, feel free to share.
Edit, november 2017: Removed key, as I no longer have the private-key, and changed links from bitcoin<dot>org to bitcoin.com