BitCoin

Bitcoin is a good way for people to conduct business off the grid, but the free ride may soon come to an end. Everyone’s favorite virtual currency has been on quite a wild ride over the past few weeks. The mainstream media finally caught wind of Bitcoin and curious parties sent it skyrocketing to $220 before watching it plummet below $70 a few short days later. It has been quite a roller coaster, but all this attention may have caught the IRS’s eye, too — Forbes contributor Robert Wood noted in a recent column that the Treasury’s FinCEN already has rules pertaining to Bitcoin, and soon the IRS might as well. More →

Do skyrocketing Bitcoin prices mean that the virtual currency is in the midst of a speculative bubble? Don’t tell that to Reddit user anon_bitcoin_gambler, who claims to have invested his “entire retirement and savings” in Bitcoin. The user, who has so far refused to reveal his identity, says that he is “quite poor” at the moment but has “good credit” that has allowed him to receive “over $30,000 USD in credit card 0% balance transfer cash” that he has “slowly been investing in bitcoin for the past two months.” More →

Prices of virtual currency Bitcoin have been absolutely surging lately but one analyst thinks such a rapid rise is more indicative of a bubble than a genuine boom. ConvergEx Group Chief Market Strategist Nick Colas tells Business Insider that the reaction from his clients “has been pretty uniform: it must be a bubble.” Colas goes on to say that the price increase in Bitcoins has been ”too far, too fast, too new” and exhibits all the signs of a classic speculative bubble. Colas also notes that “it’s very hard to short Bitcoins, so there’s no real way to express that pessimistic point of view,” which means that the price of the virtual currency may continue to rise until it experiences a hard landing. The price of Bitcoins, which remained at under $20 for all of 2012, has recently spiked to more than $110 over the span of just a few weeks.

Interestingly enough, several Bitcoin-related apps started spiking on the Spanish iPhone market over the weekend. Bitcoin Gold shot up in the Spanish iPhone Finance category from 498 to 72, and another app called Bitcoin Ticker zoomed from 526 to 52 in just one day. A leading service called Bitcoin App jumped from 194 to 151 between Friday and Sunday as Spaniards brooded over the Cyprus crisis. More →