Bitcoin has continued to soldier on past some severely difficult days over the past two weeks. 

The difficulties of Mt Gox has continued to permeate the Bitcoin landscape and drive instability in the overall market pricing. 

If you refer to the pricing charts below, Mt Gox is now closing in on $100/BTC while the other exchanges are hovering $500-700/BTC.


Bitcoin Network Capacity
The Bitcoin network capacity was 23.72PH/s last week and is now 25.29PH/s. The Bitcoin network is now 106% over the span of this week. This is showing a slowing trend for the network capacity due to the extreme level of overall calculation. Therefore, it will take substantial efforts to increase network capacity going forward.

Bitcoin Market Capitalization
The Bitcoin market capitalization is $7.0B this week. This denotes a drop of almost 50% market capitalization in the past two weeks. 

Looking Forward
Online stores like TigerDirect.com and Overstock.com have shown that adopting Bitcoin has opened their customer base and introduced an untapped revenue source. Therefore, based on their success, it will take additional faith by traditional online and brick and mortar retailers to venture into the digital currency era that has begun with Bitcoin. However, once they do, Bitcoin will become as synonymous as PayPal, Visa and American Express as a method of payment for purchases.

Cointerra has just upped the Bitcoin ASIC mining arms race with an announcement today of their second generation Bitcoin mining platform. This platform is PCI-E based and will be utilized within Bitcoin enthusiast personal computers.

Cointerra has aggressively priced this miner compared to their previous offering. This mining platform is $1599.00 USD vs their existing mining platform of $5999.00. Of course, the mining output is also diminished accordingly.

Will this new hardware pay for itself for those who purchase it?? 
Login to your favorite Bitcoin ROI calculator and take a look for yourself....Shipments begin in June 2014.

Update: Feb 14 - It appears that Bitstamp has reopened withdrawals and price of BTC is rising again.

The saying goes "beware the ides of March", however the middle of February is just as dangerous for Bitcoin.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin appears to be going through a difficult patch right now. Here are some of the current issues facing the digital currency market as a whole...not just Bitcoin.

• There is excessive pressure to regulate the currency, even by the Canadian government.
• Programming exploit found on Mt Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange. 
• Multiple Bitcoin exchanges hit with denial of service attacks.
• Exchange Bitstamp halts fiat currency withdrawals as it is attacked.

As a result of these concerted efforts, the confidence in Bitcoin is beginning to show weakness. This is reflected in the current pricing over the past week.

However, there are bright spots within this current situation, the currency algorithm itself continues to prevail despite these attacks. Additionally, the community support behind Bitcoin and Alt Coins continues to build.

Bitcoin has developed some instability in the pricing over the past two weeks. 

Specifically, the instability has accelerated due to Apple blocking the BTC blockchain app on their AppStore and the news today that Mt. Gox (largest BTC exchange) has temporarily suspended their cash withdrawals. 




Bitcoin Network Capacity
The Bitcoin network capacity was 17.42PH/s last two weeks and is now 23.72PH/s. The Bitcoin network is now 136% over the span of two weeks. 

2014 Network Prediction: The overall network will continue to grow but the incremental % increase will have to reduce due to the current level of hashing power on the Bitcoin network. The relative additional impact of hardware will start plateauing soon. Note: Based on Nov-Feb data, difficulty average is 131% --> 119% and declining each 10 day period due to increased hashing power to impact the % difficulty increase..

Bitcoin Market Capitalization
The Bitcoin market capitalization is $13.6B this week. 

For perspective, it was listed at $1.652B --> $2.504B --> $4.0B --> $6.4B --> $10.4B --> $14.8B --> $12.9B --> $11.9B --> $8.27B --> $9.8B --> $9.89B --> $11.4B --> $11.7B over these last few weeks and months.