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Over the years, Bitcoin has experienced ups and downs; the currency has been targeted by hackers and thieves and botnets and been victim to more than one embarrassing software glitch. But it has persevered, and this week, one can fairly say that Bitcoin came of age. On Monday, the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network released its first “guidance” as to how “de-centralized virtual currencies” should fit into the larger regulatory regime under which currencies of all kinds are required to operate.

Bitcoin sounds like something from science fiction: A purely digital currency, created by an anonymous hacker, that operates outside the world's traditional banking systems. The four-year-old currency is very real, though, and it's trading an all-time high, tripling in value in the last two months alone. One bitcoin is was worth about $40 U.S. dollars on Tuesday, and surged on Wednesday to nearly $49. That's up from around $13 in January, and 5 cents in 2010, according to Mt. Gox, the bitcoin market's main exchange.

The issue is whether Bitcoin will ever be so widely adopted that it acts like a real, stable currency. Right now, it’s more like a commodity with wild price swings on rumors, articles, anonymous chat-board postings, and well-publicized problems with theft. Most people should wait at least until those issues are resolved. Generally, however, average folks shouldn’t be making direct forays into currency trading; Bitcoin feels a bit like online investing, but it’s more like diving into foreign exchange with even less information on which to make currency calls.

Bitcoin is a ludicrously bad idea. It is a scam. A Scam. It is not a currency. The economic assumptions underpinning the Bitcoin ecosystem are laughable, and ignore hundreds of years of accumulated understanding of how currencies work with each other.

Fortunately, it's such an obviously flawed system that it will probably never grow to a point where it causes any ill-effects,or even impact, to world economies.

"The virtual currency Bitcoin will "bounce back" after a hack attack caused its value to collapse, according to one of its senior developers."

'Zerocoin' Add-on For Bitcoin Could Make It Truly Anonymous And Untraceable.

Bitcoin Friday! This is a Pre-Black Friday of sorts. A one day sale event at all Bitcoin merchants along with a unified attempt at advertising Bitcoin businesses. This means we need your help in two ways: please buy something with your bitcoins and please tell the world that Bitcoin businesses exist!

The last time we wrote about Bitcoin, in October, the currency's future looked grim. A series of security incidents had created an avalanche of bad press, which in turn undermined public confidence in the currency. Its value fell by more than 90 percent against the dollar. We thought Bitcoin's value would continue to collapse, but so far that hasn't happened. Instead, after hitting a low of $2, it rose back above $3 in early December, and on Monday it rose above $4 for the first time in two months.

I maintain that a government ban on bitcoin would be about as effective as alcohol prohibition was in the 1920s. Government prohibition doesn’t even do a good job of keeping drugs out of prisons. The demand for an item, in this case digital cash with user-defined levels of privacy, does not simply evaporate in the face of a jurisdictional ban. One could even make the case that it becomes stronger because an official recognition that Bitcoin is not only a “renegade” currency but a “so-effective-it-had-to-be-banned” currency would imbue the cryptographic money with larger than life qualities.