The Berlin streets where you can shop with virtual money

The digital currency is rising in popularity among traders in the rebellious Kreuzberg area of Germany’s capital. Nadim Chebli remembers well the first of his customers who decided to pay for the records they bought with virtual currency rather than cash or credit cards.

“I’d only just agreed to accept Bitcoins,” said the 36-year-old owner of the Long Player record shop, “and the first sales I made in it came pretty quickly, from a guy about my age who bought Tom Waits’s The Big Time and a young woman who bought a Beatles compilation from 1967″.

In the few months since Chebli signed up to the peer-to-peer electronic cash system, he finds it hard to come up with definitive characteristics for the “typical” Bitcoin user who walks off the street into what he describes as his “vinyl living room”… CONTINUE