For those who are still a little confused as to what exactly Bitcoins are, view this short video produced by Duncan Elms that does a nice job of explaining the reasoning behind and the inner workings of the emergence of Bitcoin and digital currencies as a whole.

This is fascinating stuff once it's placed into the global context of the financial market instability.

Video Link - Click Here

The past two weeks have provided more stability with respect to the value of Bitcoin. There is continued improvement in the value of the currency for those who are  still reviewing Bitcoin and it's long term viability. 

The currency hit a short term bottom this week of approx $87 and then promptly rebounded to a high of $97.

While the price did not escalate outside of the $80-$100 range of the past 3 months it continues to show stability and this will improve the long term viability of the currency.

Two Week Pricing Band (click image to enlarge)

Bitcoin Market Review
The Bitcoin market continues to stabilize around the $1B valuation level.

Within this weekly period the network power has increased from 195 TH/s to 234 TH/s. This represents a 20% growth in only 2 weeks...Continued investment into the Bitcoin network!!

Bitcoin market

One of my favorite internet sites www.ted.com has now posted a video explaining how Bitcoin works and the impressive growth of the counter culture cyber currency. 

TED Talks is a website dedicated to education and providing engaging and interesting discussions by leading experts on all topics available for free.

The discussion by Paul Kemp-Robertson provides a succinct summary of the incredible leaps that Bitcoin has overcome and the new emergence of "Branded Currencies".

"Your loyalty is a micro economy"



LINK TO SITE

OR click photo below to visit TED site for this video.

Bitcoin's global reach continues to grow and new exchanges and manner of transfer are springing up around the world. 

Here's a brief listing of the newest developments in different areas of the world. The most promising aspect of this list below is showing that Bitcoin is becoming available within strong banking and currency markets and also countries and continents were there is a very weak economy and limited access to funds.

• Argentina - Bitcoin Downloads Triple in July
  
• Germany - Bitcoin.de and Fidor Bank AG form partnership
• Israel - Buying Bitcoins in Person
• Iran - Buying Bitcoins with CoinAva
• Afghanistan - First recorded Bitcoin transaction
• Kenya - Bitcoin and M-Pesa
  
• London - Bitcoin investors and entrepreneurs 
• Canada - Tops list for most Bitcoin downloads per capita

There are very interesting developments continuing to occur within the Bitcoin community. The latest development includes accelerating mainstream media  exposure. 

This acceleration of media exposure will continue to grow due to the upcoming documentaries "The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin", "Life on Bitcoin"  and the most recent endeavor just announced "Bitcoin: The Movie". 

The documentary trailer for "The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin" can be viewed in the link below. This documents the technical and financial aspects of Bitcoin through the eyes of a computer programmer.

Trailer - The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin

The secondary documentary called "Life On Bitcoin" from the young married couple in Utah documenting their experience living on Bitcoin alone for 90 days, can be found in the Kickstarter link below.

Trailer - Life on Bitcoin

Finally, the most recent announced movie is called "Bitcoin - The Movie". The link to this Kickstarter campaign can be found in the link below.

Trailer - Bitcoin The Movie

If ever there was a quotable quote regarding Bitcoin, this has to be it...."Bitcoin. The Red Cross of Currencies"

http://t.co/JUtKDRnzcN

There has been a new precedent set in the Bitcoin community. The Bitcoin website SatoshiDice has sold for $12.5 million. 

Owners of S-DICE shares are listed on the MPEX and are entitled to 0.00126315 BTC per share. Each share was issued at the initial IPO for one hundred-millionth of the company. However, the CEO of SatoshiDice is paying shareholders 0.0035 BTC per share. 

The original S.DICE shares were bought at the time when 1 BTC was worth less than $15.00/BTC and now hovers around $92/BTC at the time of this article.

This represents a tidy sum of $0.322 per share vs the initial purchase price of $0.0189 per share. This calculates to a 1700% gain on initial investment.

There is a very interesting glimpse into the future improvements that are coming into the Bitcoin network. 

The most notable improvement would be the inclusion of digital certificates much like online purchasing over the internet. 

According to the article posted on CoinDesk, 


" In the new system, the customer will send their payment to the merchant, encoded with extra information, including some of the information in the payment request as a reference, along with a refund address in the event that the merchant needs to send funds back. "


This will go a long way to improving the ease of use for Bitcoin and continue its adoption into the mainstream commerce engine...especially online.


CoinDesk Article - http://www.coindesk.com/merchant-friendly-payments-less-than-perfect-but-better-than-before/

This was another turbulent week in the value of Bitcoin. However, this week was substantially better for those invested in the long term viability of mining. The currency hit a short term bottom this week of $65.42 and then promptly rebounded to a high of $104.17 today.

The escalation of price is important to continue investment into the mining aspect of the Bitcoin network which provides the network stability while rewarding the miners with Bitcoins themselves.

Bitcoin Market Review
The Bitcoin market itself has recovered nicely from a weekly capitalization $774M to gain the money back and return to capitalization levels of $992M.

One important aspect to note is the quick increase in total network hashrate. Within this weekly period the network power has increased from 168 TH/s to 195 TH/s. This represents a 16% growth in only 1 week...Amazing!!

Bitcoin pricing chart (click to enlarge)

Bitcoin Market

This week in Bitcoin has been extremely volatile. 

Bitcoin market
The price of Bitcoin has slid this week from a stable $90/B to a level not seen for some time, around $70/B.

This has reduced the overall Bitcoin market capitalization from over $1.1B  for the past few months to just over $770M in a relatively short period of time.

The difficulty of each block still remains on an upward tragjectory (currently 21M and scheduled to increase to 23.5M). This will provide increased pressure on Bitcoin miners to improve the efficiency of their operations to remain profitable.

The current mining factor is $0.16 USD/24hrs@100Mhash/s. These levels have not been seen since the fall of 2012.


Click images to enlarge.