By Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey — The Wall Street Journal

When payment processor Bitpay announced the biggest-ever funding round for a bitcoin company earlier Tuesday it was was Richard Branson’s presence in the investment group that drew the most attention.

But while the Virgin Group chairman’s remarks about Bitpay leading a “currency revolution” were lapped up by bitcoin enthuisasts, we thought the comments from some of the lesser known investors were as, if not more, illuminating. They helped frame what might be called the emerging venture-capitalist vision for bitcoin: That its promise lies in disrupting an antiquated, inefficient and expensive global payments system more than as a revolutionary challenger to traditional currencies.

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Matt Rocheleau — Boston.com

Each of the 4,500-plus undergraduates at MIT will soon get $100 in bitcoin as part of a project launched by a pair of students who announced today that they’ve raised a half million dollars to fund the effort.

Organizers said they hope to establish “an ecosystem for digital currencies” at the Cambridge campus that will allow professors and researchers to study how students use bitcoin as well as to promote other academic and entrepreneurial activity around bitcoin.

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Cyrus Farivar — Ars Technica

For many crypto-minded libertarians, Bitcoin is the future of money. But that dream hasn’t been helped much by the numerous high-profile legal cases involving the currency in recent years: The Bitcoin Savings and Trust hedge fund collapsed; uncertainty fueled the implosion of Mt. Gox, the currency’s largest exchange; and the high-profile Silk Road takedown is a treacherous story combining Bitcoin, drugs, and alleged murders.

For now, though, one company sits above all others when it comes to cultivating a new level of direct customer mistrust in the Bitcoin community: Butterfly Labs.

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Jason Clenfield and Pavel Alpeyev — Bloomberg


In the five years since bitcoin was created, the hunt for them has consumed enough electricity to keep the Eiffel Tower lit for 260 years. One man’s way around the utility bills: the family power plant.

Alex Wilhelm is a bitcoin miner, one of thousands who use computers to solve complex math problems and get their hands on the digital currency. The expatriate living in Tokyo has 30 remote-controlled servers mining virtual gold in an old brick building in the Austrian countryside. His father is donating the electricity, which comes from a water-driven turbine that survived a World War II bombing raid and once powered the entire village of Tattendorf, where Wilhelm grew up.

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Zack Burgess — Crains Detroit Business


The next time you grab a sandwich, order a pizza or pay for IT services, you may not have to reach for your wallet. Instead, you could have the option of paying the bill with bitcoins.

Businesses including the Bronx Deli in Farmington, Dynamic Technologies in Livonia, Athena Coney Island in Novi and Papa Romano’s in Troy affirm the use of bitcoin currency. According to coinmap.org, a website that tracks the businesses using it, there are at least 10 in the area that accept bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn’t regulated as a currency or security, though federal regulators, most recently the Securities and Exchange Commission, have raised red flags about it. In March, the SEC sent an inquiry and data request to the currency’s creator, an elusive person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto doesn’t believe the SEC has any legal grounds.

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Mary Thompson — CNBC

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Jennifer Liberto — CNN Money


Bitcoin companies are hiring lobbyists, visiting lawmakers on Capitol Hill and writing to agencies about how they should write rules that will determine the future of the fast-growing virtual currency.

It’s all part of a push to shape how Washington ultimately regulates the independent, digital money that is growing in popularity.

“The most important thing we’re doing is explaining how Bitcoin works,” said Jim Harper, a lobbyist who was hired recently as counsel for the Bitcoin Foundation, an organization that represents Bitcoin companies and investors. Harper, who has lobbied for PayPal and VeriSign, is paid in bitcoin.

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Darrell Etherington — Tech Crunch

In the sci-fi show Almost Human, everyone has a bitcoin wallet. More and more places to spend bitcoin means that could become a reality, and popular indie merchant mobile payment provider Square is the latest to accept the cryptocurrency.

In an announcement today on their blog, which isn’t an April Fool’s Joke pushed early Square assures us, the company notes that bitcoin can be used to buy goods and services with Square Market as of today. That means shoppers can pay using the virtual currency on Square’s online storefront, which includes items from merchants around the world collected in one place.

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Alex Hern — The Guardian

The promise of bitcoin is a universal currency free from the control of any nation or government. But a new generation of cryptocurrencies are focusing on the opposite goal: building money to solve problems specific to one country.

On midnight Monday, Auroracoin, a bitcoin clone which is the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency being traded today, entered the second phase of its life, with a “helicopter drop” of 30 auroracoins to every citizen of Iceland.

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Rob Wile — Business Insider


The Wall Street Journal’s Gregory Zuckerman reports Andreessen Horowitz plans to invest “hundreds of millions” more dollars in Bitcoin-related businesses, on top of the $50 million they have already dropped, mostly on Coinbase.

Bitcoin prices have lost nearly 50% of their value over the past four months or so, and now trade at around $570. Analysts from Goldman Sachs recently cast doubt on the viability of the digital currency itself, though added its underlying technology may yet prove useful.

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