will now buy a car in Overland Park

"I think we're probably the first car dealer in the United States" to accept bitcoins, said Norman Vialle, president and owner of Overland Park Jeep Dodge Ram Chrysler.There are no buyers yet, Vialle said, though he has had some inquiries.The car dealer at 87th Street and Metcalf Avenue signed up earlier this month with BitPay Inc., a bitcoin version of the popular PayPal online payment service.It's another important step for bitcoins as they move out of the shadows of seedier transactions that skirt government oversight and sometimes the law.When they first pinged across the Internet, bitcoins could buy almost nothing.Now there's almost nothing the cybercurrency can't buy, from hard drugs to hard currency, songs to survival gear, cars to consumer goods. Retailers are welcoming the virtual currency, whose unofficial symbol looks like a dollar sign with B instead of an S. Advocates describe bitcoins as the foundation stone of a Utopian economy: no borders, no change fees, no closing hours and no one to tell you what you can and can't do with your money.At a Starbucks in Buenos Aires, Argentinean Patricio Fink recently converted $600 into bitcoins. The software developer delivered cash to a pair of Australian tourists who wanted to pick up some spending money at unofficial currency conversion rates without risking Argentina's black market exchanges.In the safety of the coffee shop, the tourists transferred their bitcoins to Fink by using an app on their smartphone."It's something that is new," said Fink, 24, who described the deal to The Associated Press over Skype. "And it's working."It's transactions like these — up to 70,000 of them each day over the past month — that have propelled bitcoins from Internet oddity to the cusp of mainstream use, a remarkable breakthrough for a currency that made its online debut only four years ago.