you can buy Bitcoins with USD or Generate coins by letting them use your PC processing power, in which you get very very lttle bitcoins this way, so the bitcoins are based on CPU cycles I guess, and there are a few places that accept bitcoins but not many, if people in Keene started using it to transfer money around and buy and sell it might be useful, and people Using TOR use bitcoins to buy and sell illegal items.
And if you believe bit coins is a good idea it could be a alternative way of protecting against inflation