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Neon Tommy - Annenberg digital news

Bitcoin Valued At 1000+ USD

Benjamin Li |
November 27, 2013 | 12:03 p.m. PST

Executive Producer

Bitcoin passed the 1,000 dollar mark for the first time since the digital currency's inception.

Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, one of the largest online marketplaces that accepts Bitcoin as its primary currency, valued it at 1,073 dollars Wednesday.

Prices for the virtual currency soared after a U.S. Senate hearing on regulating Bitcoins unexplored possibilities resulted in a positive ruling:

"It isn't just the bitcoin community saying that bitcoin is used for good things and there's a lot of great potential, we have members of Congress and government agencies who all agree," said Jinyoung Lee Englund, a spokesperson for the Bitcoin Foundation based in Washington.

It seems the government is more concerned with controlling the currency rather than regulating it, confident that they have the capability to shut down Bitcoin crime, especially following the containment of the Silk Road.

The value of Bitcoin has fluctuated significantly over the last few months - less than three weeks ago it was worth 200 dollars, and last week, Bitcoin's value was at 632 dollars.

Bitcoin's value dipped to 110 dollars on October 3rd, when the Silk Road, an online black market in which sex traffickers, weapons dealers, and assassins sold their services for Bitcoin, was shut down.

Although the concept of a Bitcoin (mining a fixed amount of digital currency through solving complex mathematical equations) is still vaguely abstract to many, it is surely making enough waves in the marketplace to be worth paying attention to.

What exactly is it, though? Nobody's really sure, not even the best and brightest tech minds out there. Read more about it at TheNextWeb.

 

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