"At least when tulip mania ended you got a tulip at the end," said Nout Wellink, a former Dutch central banker. By Alex Hern

Chinese regulators have banned financial institutions from using Bitcoin, warning that the virtual currency could be used for illegal activities and speculation.

China’s yuan overtook the euro to become the second-most used currency in global trade finance in 2013, according to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The currency had an 8.66 percent share of letters of credit and collections in October, compared with 6.64 percent for the euro, Swift said in a statement today.

Maybe bitcoin will be the world reserve currency, maybe it will totally fail, or maybe it will survive in some niche capacity. I don’t know how to weight the probabilities (although I think in the immediate term it's likely to go down), but I do have a thought about the metric to watch: growth in legitimate transactions. A currency without the major use case being legitimate transactions is going to fail.

Five east African countries have taken the first steps towards establishing a common currency. At a meeting in Kampala, Uganda, the presidents of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda said they would adopt a single currency within the next 10 years.

Following yesterday’s news that Bitcoin had passed the $1000 mark, the halo effect continues this morning with the crypto-currency market capitalization site coinmarketcap.com reporting that Litecoin has joined the billion dollar virtual currency club. Litecoin is currently trading at $48.99 with a market cap of $1.14 billion dollars (as of writing).

Virtual currency: It is mathematically elegant, increasingly popular and highly controversial. Bitcoin’s success is putting it under growing strain.

For many people, bitcoin seems like something from the day after tomorrow. For Lawrence Blankenship, it’s already a thing of the past.A software engineer from Springfield, Mo., Mr. Blankenship is putting his money on PeerCoin, one of the biggest of the virtual currencies that are being promoted as alternatives to bitcoin.

A digital 'wallet' containing 7,500 Bitcoins that James Howells generated on his laptop is buried under four feet of rubbish

The value of a bitcoin has topped $1,000, a mere 11 months after the fledgling digital currency was worth little more than a $10 bill.

As a security researcher, I admire bitcoin-the-protocol. But I believe bitcoin-the-currency contains a fatal flaw.

The Weizmann Institute’s Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir have been closely studying the movement of the semi-anonymous digital currency Bitcoin, and today published a paper that highlights an unusual set of transactions that may closely link its inventor, a mysterious figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto to Silk Road mastermind Dread Pirate Roberts.

One of the unique things about Bitcoin is that every transaction on its network is publicly available for anyone to examine. Any time a user sends a payment to another user, that transaction is reflected in the "blockchain," a global, permanent ledger of Bitcoin transactions.

Back in April, an online gamer noticed that his computer seemed to be working harder than it should be given what he had running on it. When he checked his logs, he realized that his computer, much to his surprise, had joined a Bitcoin mining pool in the Czech Republic and was helping someone to mine the cryptocurrency.

This has been a big week for Bitcoin. On Monday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held the first-ever Congressional hearing on Bitcoin. Later in the day, the currency's value reached an all-time high of more than $800. That has left a lot of people scratching their heads. What's Bitcoin? How do you use it? And why would anyone want to? Read on for answers.

China has experience with virtual currencies. So it understands why it is important to quickly become a leading player in the Bitcoin market.

If Bitcoin Is So Secure, Why Have There Been Dozens of Bitcoin Bank Robberies And Millions In Losses?

Predicting the imminent collapse of the U.S. dollar, a Russian lawmaker submitted a bill to his country’s parliament Wednesday that would ban the use or possession of the American currency.

Don't look now, but everyone's favorite crypto-currency is creeping back up the charts again. Over the past two weeks the value of a bitcoin has skyrocketed from just over $200...

In its first week, the Bitcoin ATM, located at a coffee shop in Vancouver, traded more than $100,000 CDN worth of the cybercurrency, though it's unknown how many unique users took advantage of the new service.