Gene Okerlund

Christian Ander is one of the entrepreneurs making a big push for wide Bitcoin adoption in the Nordic countries.

In response to the world’s first Bitcoin Boulevard, in the Netherlands, an entrepreneur in Cleveland, Ohio, has rounded up a community of local merchants to create a similar shopping district.

Texas says it will not regulate digital currencies as money In what could be an interesting test case for America’s federal system as Washington looks to establish a regulatory framework for digital currencies, Texas banking regulators have drawn up statewide rules that will not regulate such currencies as money.

Writer and Bitcoin activist Meghan Kellison-Lords (or M.K. Lords) has been doing some great work down in the Florida panhandle in the southern US.

Bitcoin angel investor and Blockchain business developer Roger Ver has worked tirelessly for a few years to promote Bitcoin in the mainstream press, and a few narratives about him seem to have stuck.

Cyprus was long used as an offshore haven for fiat currencies, but the financial crisis of 2012-2013 culminated in massive levies on uninsured bank accounts in Cyprus with deposits of at least 100,000 euro.

Stripe, the online payments processor that graduated from Y Combinator in 2010, announced last week that it was testing Bitcoin support and would be opening up to beta testing in the near future.

The proliferation of altcoins and various cryptocurrencies has the potential to completely reshape local economies. We have already seen cryptocoins with a country-specific focus, and we have even seen them work at the neighborhood level.

“On 24th March 2014 we will be freezing the current BTC, LTC, TRC and FTC accounts, then perform the below distribution of the available coins and reenable deposits and withdrawals,” a statement on the site read. “This action will also require us to delete all open sell orders for BTC, LTC, FTC and TRC.”

The Bitcoin Foundation announced Wednesday that a number of updates had been made to Bitcoin Core and that v. 0.9.0 was now available.

merkletree.io launched only at the beginning of this year, and its team consists of just a couple of guys in the US. But those two, in just a few months, have put together the go-to resource for anyone asking, “What is Iceland’s stance on cryptocurrencies?”

Embattled exchange Mt. Gox has a simple sign-in option on its website now with an invitation to “see your wallet(s) balance.”

Bitcointalk.org forum member keccak512 announced in a post on March 8 a currency called Heavycoin, an altcoin that puts specific focus on security.

Xapo Ltd. announced Friday that it had secured a first round of funding worth $20 million, Bloomberg reports.

We reported last month that high-speed network company Perseus Telecom was working on a big cryptocurrency exchange project. They launched it yesterday.

Jimmy Wales, president of Wikia, Inc. and co-founder of Wikipedia, took to Reddit on Monday morning to discuss Bitcoin.

Russia’s central bank offered a formal response to a letter written by a Russian citizen in February asking for more information on why the government allegedly banned cryptocurrencies earlier this year.

On Wednesday, London’s first Bitcoin ATM, a Lamassu machine, launched at the Old Shoreditch Station cafe. The cafe is run by an arts collective called Jaguar Shoes, and they have been accepting Bitcoin payment themselves since last summer.

President Obama is on record as a fan of the TV show “The Wire.” In that series, Baltimore drug dealers would constantly purchases new prepaid cell phones (“burners”) to keep their telecoms activity anonymous and almost untraceable.

Lost amid the chaos surrounding Mt. Gox’s collapse last week was the announcement that a new exchange with a particularly user-friendly design had begun its soft launch.

Former US Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers called Bitcoin “a very, very important development” in an interview he gave to Politico on Monday at the National Association for Business Economics Policy Conference in Arlington, Virginia.

GPU mining has enjoyed a bit of a Renaissance with the rising popularity of altcoins such as Litecoin and Dogecoin, whose mining difficulty does not require those arms-race mega machines people use to mine Bitcoin these days.

We report on a number of businesses worldwide that introduce Bitcoin payment processing, and most of those businesses admit that they exchange their Bitcoins for fiat currencies almost immediately.

Thai exchange Bitcoin Co. has resumed Bitcoin trading after a letter from the Bank of Thailand took the chill off cryptocurrency trading.

The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer has a funny piece up that notes how it is now possible to exchange Bitcoin for tulips directly online.

“The Commission has a policy of encouraging innovation. Virtual currencies are an area of innovation which the Commission continues to monitor closely while recognising that there are currently significant risks associated with them.