For the fortunate minority throughout history, as with Darwin, a given currency is not subject to question. It serves as the accepted means of exchange and is recognized as such from the time one is old enough to understand value. In this way, currencies are not understood as subject to the laws of natural selection. For the less fortunate majority throughout history, and likely for more fortunate generations to come, this may not be the case.

International payment system Visa may stop operations in Russia if the international payment systems are obliged to make guarantee payments of hundreds of millions of dollars, Bloomberg reported with reference to Visa’s CEO Charlie Scharf. Meanwhile, Russia was not going to end cooperation with Visa and MasterCard, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told journalists on Tuesday.

Let’s say you come across a song you really like online. Maybe it sounds like Nina Simone singing over LCD Soundsystem. Whatever it is, you love it and you want to show some love to the person who created it.

The beauty of bitcoin, many of those who use the currency will tell you, is that it's decentralized. You don't have to bother with a bank, which means you don't necessarily leave the kind of paper trail that many other transactions produce. From the user perspective, paying with bitcoin is basically like using cash—only you can do it online.

A man who claims he is the best counterfeiter in the world, Frank Bourassa, has been allowed to go free after turning over a huge quantity of fake U.S. $20 bills that authorities say are “not detectable by the naked eye.” Bourassa, a resident of Trois Rivieres outside Montreal, Canada, spent only a month and a half in jail and Canadian authorities agreed earlier this year that they would not extradite him to the United States for prosecution.

Americans will soon be able to make donations in cryptocurrencies to politicians – but not anonymously

Regulators said political action committees can accept small amounts of donations in bitcoin, a digital currency that's increasingly popular despite turbulent valuation fluctuations. PACs will have to convert bitcoin into cash before spending it, though...

What’s being touted in some circles as the future of money looks hardly more peaceful than its past. Bitcoin, a formerly obscure cyber-currency, is now all over the headlines with reports of bankruptcies, thefts and FBI lockdowns. If our fate is to buy and sell in bitcoins, this instability is troubling. But despite the headlines, the triumph of Bitcoin and related cyber-currencies is a lot less likely than recent commentary would suggest. One cause of all this hype?

Josh Wise will be driving a Dogecoin sponsored car on Sunday at Talladega. But what is Dogecoin? Jordan Bianchi set out to see what NASCAR fans knew about Wise's sponsor for the weekend.

One of the main programmers working on Bitcoin is raising funds to send several satellites into orbit in order to make the digital currency more stable and resilient to attacks

Bitcoin, the electronic peer-to-peer currency that sidesteps more traditional methods of payment, is about to be launched into space. In a joint venture between Dunvegan Space Systems and Deep Space Industries Inc., the aim is to add an extra verification layer to bitcoin by creating a system of orbital hubs called BitSats.

“Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet,” says Naval Ravikant. “Our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle,” concurs Fred Wilson. And Andreessen Horowitz have very visibly doubled down on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin reached another milestone today, with the cryptocurrency falling below the $400 per-coin mark. Bitcoin sold for over $1,100 inside of the last 52 weeks.

Pyongyang has been cracking down on foreign currencies in the capital, a Seoul-based publication has reported, but an expert thinks the scope of the campaign is limited. “As the DPRK has solidified its resolve to change foreign currencies (such as the U.S. Dollar and Chinese Yuan) to domestic currency (the won) for the Pyongyang residents, the market exchange rate has been declining,” a source from Pyongyang told the Daily NK last week.

On Tuesday, Congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX) announced his plan to submit a bill officially declaring Bitcoin a currency. If introduced, this legislation will mark the first time that federal lawmakers in the United States will grapple directly with the concept of virtual currencies. Stockman’s announcement came during his address at the Inside Bitcoins conference in New York City.

Have you ever thought about where money comes from and why it is so valuable?

You’d have to hunt pretty hard to find a worse investment over the last three months than Bitcoin. The electronic currency is down 38% against the US dollar since Dec. 31, making it one of the worst assets that we keep an eye on here at Quartz.

Two years before Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy, a half dozen employees at the Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange challenged CEO Mark Karpeles over whether client money was being used to cover costs, according to three people who participated in the discussion. The question of how Mt. Gox handled other people's money - the issue raised by staff in the showdown with Karpeles in early 2012 - remains crucial to unraveling a multi-million dollar mystery under examination by authorities in Japan.

The Tokyo court has extended deadline for the examiner to submit the results of the MtGox investigation to May 9, 2014, providing more time for Mt Gox. The report was expected today after a month long analysis made on the MtGox system. This would be another setback for the users anxiously waiting for their funds. The …

In the long, kabuki saga that is the fall of Mt.Gox, one point seemed always clear: the company lost loads of bitcoin to hackers using a bug called transaction malleability. It seems, however that this is wrong. According to a team at the ETH Zurich University, the company allegedly lost only 386 BTC or $200,000, nowhere close to the 744,408 bitcoins rumored to have been lost in the attack.