Bitcoin is gaining real world popularity in Berlin. The article from the Guardian provides a peek into the ease of buying/selling goods within a local neighborhood using Bitcoin.

Source Article - The Guardian.co.uk

It's official, Butterfly labs has begun shipping their product to developers and early supporters of their ASIC Bitcoin mining product. David Perry at Coding in my Sleep has posted a video of the unboxing and testing of the 5GH/s miner. Enjoy.

Bitcoin is rapidly developing a mainstream presence in the financial markets. However, the analysts are trying to categorize it as an asset, currency and/or commodity. In essence, it is all of these in one. Additionally, Bitcoin is also a brand new peer to peer protocol for financial transactions.

On this basis, Bitcoin is poised to become the disruptive technology of the future that allows for "cloud finance" and the ability to transact business around the world in a common currency without any bank or intermediary in between.

As a result there is extreme skepticism within the banking system as to how Bitcoin will continue to grow.

The video below from Max Keiser begins to explain the future of Bicoin and the next steps required to continue to expand the network
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As those who follow Bitcoin, it has been an extremely volatile week for Bitcoin pricing. We have seen stability of late around the $100 per Bitcoin value and suddenly during the week of April 6 -13 the value shot up to $266 per Bitcoin. Inevitably, as with all market rushes, there was an anticipated drop in value pending. 

If we review the graph below, we can see just how pronounced the pricing increase was in the span of the entire week. Click photo for larger image.

From this graph, you can clearly see the value of Bitcoin jump from $140 to $260+ within April 7-10. This effectively doubled the market capitalization of Bitcoin from $1.5B to $3.0B in three days. As expected, this was not sustainable and the pricing corrected itself later on April 10th. 

What has been seen since that time is the return of Bitcoin to the more market stabilized pricing of around $100 per Bitcoin. This shows inherently that Bitcoin did not crash as many websites have predicted but the "manic" buying was a factor of over hyping a new technology and could not be sustained within such a short period of time. 

If you review the market capitalization of Bitcoin today, you will see the return to $1.3B or roughly back where this whole process started. 

Max Keiser discusses the current economic system and how the decentralized currency Bitcoin is poised to capture additional market presence as a medium of exchange and a method of value storage.

Here is a rare glimpse inside Butterfly labs offices and factory. It offers a tangible look into a the inner workings of a newly formed company designing and developing a product for the Bitcoin industry. The units shown in the the video are the FCPA products that are no longer being produced in anticipation of the ASIC chip based products.

Butterfly Labs (BFL) has lifted the curtain slightly to allow it's customers and the general public a glimpse of their ASIC miner. Currently BFL is the second vendor that is anticipated to bring a fully functioning custom chip miner based on ASIC technology to market. Unfortunately, these miners were promised to be delivered in Oct, 2012 and have experienced significant delays in production since then. As you can see from the video below, it appears the chipset and boards are working but, there appears to be a significant issue with power regulation.

Bitcoin Market Capitalization has reached an all time high. It just surpassed $1.5 Billion dollars in valuation. This in itself is not remarkable. 

However, what is remarkable is this represents a 50% increase in value in only 1 week.