A 15-year-old's design for the new £1 coin has been chosen ahead of more than 6,000 entries. David Pearce's drawing will feature on the new currency that will be released in 2017. He was told the news by George Osborne. "Designing the new £1 coin was a brilliant opportunity to leave a lasting legacy on what will be the most secure coin in circulation anywhere," the Chancellor said.

City analysts are betting that the euro could soon sink to the same value as the US dollar on foreign exchanges, after the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing programme kicked off. The euro has fallen sharply since last summer when Mario Draghi, the ECB president, laid the groundwork for QE; but the currency has fallen further since the monthly €60bn (£42bn) bond-buying programme began on Monday. The dollar’s value has been boosted by strong hints from...

Dogecoin was never supposed to be taken seriously. The cryptocurrency based on the do​ge meme was originally started for shits and giggles. It attracted lighthearted individuals who were more interested in cracking jokes than in getting rich quick, who preferred to donate coins for causes both silly and serious than to hoard troves of digital treasure. But its greatest strength was also its greatest weakness. The dizzying rise in popularity made Dogecoin a target.

In the early morning hours of October 21st, 2014, Partap Davis lost $3,000. He had gone to sleep just after 2AM in his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home after a late night playing World of Tanks. While he slept, an attacker undid every online security protection he set up. By the time he woke up, most of his online life had been compromised: two email accounts, his phone, his Twitter, his two-factor authenticator, and most importantly, his bitcoin wallets.

The search for riches in the ground has motivated some of history’s most extravagant endeavors. It has inspired explorers, enslaved populations, and put opera houses in dusty mountain towns. But when the boom ends, the miners themselves have often been left in the lurch. They handle the raw material, turn it from hard earth to something potentially of value. Fabulous wealth comes to only a few, who rarely hold onto it long enough to be considered lucky. The search for bitcoins is little...

Blockchain technology is a new concept in large-scale coordination due to a number of key features. First, a blockchain is an open universal transaction system. Every transaction worldwide is processed the same way and posted and made available for viewing on the blockchain. The transaction ledger is publicly-inspectable on-demand at any future moment.

While the tech world is busy speculating about bitcoin’s volatile value, cryptocurrency is making arguably its biggest impact in countries where the current price of 1 bitcoin exceeds the average salary earned in a week. Kenya, Uruguay and Panama are just a few of the countries playing host to a growing group of venture-backed bitcoin companies that are using blockchain technology to tackle regional payments challenges.

The letter S appears nowhere in the word "dollar", yet an S with a line through it ($) is unmistakably the dollar sign. But why an S? Why isn't the dollar sign something like a Đ (like the former South Vietnamese đồng, or the totally-not-a-joke-currency Dogecoin)?

Bitcoin has a marketing problem. Talk of the digital currency has petered since its introduction in 2009, and much of what remains hasn't been good for P.R. Discussions about Bitcoin can sound like inscrutable technobabble to non-adherents (most people fall into this category), and the system has been dogged by hacking and fraud, making a concept that is hard to wrap your head around also hard to get behind.

If you've ever pondered the possibility of getting into bitcoin mining (or have taken the plunge), then you are probably at least a little bit familiar with bitcoin mining calculators. These calculators let you input your hash rate (hash rate is the speed at which your miner mines) and outputs the amount of bitcoin you could expect to earn in a given period of time. While those calculators are awesome and handy, understanding the math behind them is even more awesome!

The euro has fallen sharply against the dollar after the anti-austerity Syriza party won the Greek general election. The euro briefly fell as low as $1.1088 - the lowest level against the dollar in more than 11 years. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras has pledged to renegotiate the terms of Greece's €240bn bailout and reverse many of the austerity cuts. But he said his government wanted a negotiation, not confrontation, with its international lenders.

Bitcoin's price over the past week was a scene of panic for many, but also jubilation for some, as it plummeted by over $100 over two days, only to quickly regain half of those losses. The well-prepared trader would have profited from this intense volatility. The bitcoin price opened the week at $267.09 and closed at $209.63, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index. That's a loss of $57.46 or 22% over the seven days.

The price of bitcoin may be dropping, but funding continues to roll in for startups working with the digital currency. Coinbase, a startup that provides a digital wallet for buying, selling and storing bitcoins, announced Tuesday that it raised $75 million in a Series C funding round from a list of big name investors including, in a symbolic boost of confidence, the New York Stock Exchange.

You can purchase a bitcoin for just over $185 at the moment, a price that is down nearly 8 percent in the last hour, and 46.7 percent in the last month. Of course, you can pick any price timeframe you want, but it’s fair to say that bitcoin’s dollar value has had a rough time of it in recent days.

The price of Bitcoin has taken bit of a dive over the last couple of days, shedding over 20 percent of its value in the last 24 hours. The sell-off, like other sell-offs and rallies before it, draws a lot of attention and questions about what it means for the future of the technology. Here's why I don't focus on price much.

Bitcoin entrepreneur Roger Ver has been effectively locked out of his native USA after this week being denied a non-immigrant visa for the third time. Ver, who publicly gave up his US citizenship in 2014, was planning to speak at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami from 16-18th January. He tweeted the following message to his 18,800 followers...

2014 will be the year flooded with the tears of speculators. Falling prices this past year have lead to many theories regarding price. One of the most recent is a rehash of the very old – Any service like BitPay crashes the bitcoin price. Founded in 2011, BitPay is the leading payment service provider (PSP) specializing in the peer-to-peer virtual currency Bitcoin. Over the past four years, they have provided merchants the means of accepting bitcoins without the risk of price volatility.

Quick, how much cash is in your wallet? If you’re like the average American, barely enough for a couple of movie tickets: The median consumer carries just $22. A handful of people roll bigger. Roughly one in five people carry more than $100. One in twenty carry a pickpocket’s dream—$100 bills—according to a new study by Claire Greene and Scott Schuh of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. They were trying to shed light on some of the biggest mysteries about U.S. currency: Where is it all?

European bitcoin exchange Bitstamp suspended trading Monday after one of its active, operational bitcoin storage wallets was "compromised" over the weekend. In a statement on its site, Bitstamp warned users not to deposit any Bitcoin to previously issued addresses. The popular bitcoin trading site, said to be the world's third busiest bitcoin exchange amounting for 6 percent of all bitcoin transactions, said that a "small fraction" of customer bitcoins...

About 99 percent of the bitcoins that disappeared from a virtual currency transaction system operated by Mt. Gox may have vanished due to fraudulent transactions, not from cyber-attacks as the company initially claimed, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned. The Metropolitan Police Department has been investigating the case in which about 650,000 bitcoins — worth about ¥24.7 billion as of Wednesday — went missing from Mt. Gox’s online exchange system...