Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency. Peer-to-peer (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or keep track of transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network.

Bitcoin is an open source project created by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is currently in beta development stage. Bitcoin development is hosted at SourceForge.

This tutorial shows how you can use GnuPG to secure and verify data on your Linux box but the first part is relevant for Windows users too.