A new Internet auction house that the developers expect should mimic eBay with bitcoins has cropped up and it looks like business is growing. In a recent interview with BTCBase.com [German language] the lead for BitMit.net Auction House, Marius Falke talks about the challenges of accepting bitcoin for products and how it’s affected his business.

“People all over the world can offer currency for their goods and products,” Falke explains. “Except what makes us special is instead of euros or dollars they pay with the digital, distributed and inflation-protected Bitcoin currency.”

He goes on to say that he expects that BitMit.net can compete directly with extremely popular sites such as eBay.

He adds, “We would fill a niche difficult to regular payment methods and could to attract visitors” Referring to how bitcoins offer a different type of transaction than euros or dollars and there are currently few services on the market that use bitcoins as a currency for auction house type sites. This means that BitMit has very little competition in this market and could make a hefty dent.

To Falke, the semi-anonymous nature of Bitcoin is no obstruction to free-and-open trading because each transaction is still tied to a particular address. In the end, the currency is still exchanged and the product is still moved from place-to-place. After a little discussion, he entertains what is already a problem with any other more traditional currency system and online auction houses involving fraudulent items being sent or failed to sent.

BitMit.net also has an escrow service to help avoid these sorts of problems like other auction houses and that they try their best to use document authentication and other modern day methods to make certain customers are not cheated or cheaters.

According to Falke, BitMit has been doing slow but steady business, “In total there were 15 successful sales since 11/27/2011.” However, most of those, he explains have been in the last few days where interest in the site has really taken off.

The most expensive item on the page I’ve seen so far is an Apple Macbook with 8 bids currently running for 4.506 BTC (but a buy now at 191.011 BTC.) I suspect that BitMit runs a low-threshold for open purchases of expensive items. At the moment the site appears to be housing an estimated 80 items for sale and on every page at least one or two have current bids.

Being a lover of Bitcoin, Falke suggests the Casascius physical coin as a visual example of the electronic currency.

With the bitcoin exchange market already exceeding $6 again it looks like the coins are once again regaining their value. There’s a decent trading volume and a non-stop discussion of their trade. In order to rise to the next level, though, bitcoins really need to inject themselves into common markets and that means getting merchants to accept them.

An online auction house with some sort of traction—and BitMit could be it—would do wonders for the adoption and stabilization of bitcoins as an alternative currency.