Excellent question, I'd really like to know as well, to see what's beneath the hype. What I do know: anonymous money transactions. Of course, you'll still have

Excellent question, I'd really like to know as well, to see what's beneath the hype. What I do know: anonymous money transactions. Of course, you'll still have the anonymity loss when converting to/from dollars. While the parties are anonymous, all transactions are visible. In many cases that means that people can end up associating your bitcoin address with your identity (assuming they manage to puzzle out the patterns of your transactions and cross-check that with known addresses). Mechanisms like CoinJoin allow you to mix your transactions with those of others, in order to obscure them, but then the CoinJoin provider still sees your transactions.