Peer2Politics

Watch the full episode on Thursday! Keiser and Stacy Herbert visit Russell Brand at his Trews set in East London for a double header of Christmas cheer. The three discuss the big themes of...

Bitcoin is big news again. The digital cryptocurrency is on the frontpage of every major newspaper. This week its price collapsed because the largest exchange on the network did not handle a known design flaw in bitcoin properly, which caused widespread disruption and possibly some loss of bitcoin. As a precaution, several exchanges had to close their virtual doors till further notice.

BITCOIN has been called many things, from the future of money to a drug dealer's dream and everything else in between.

In the past year, Bitcoin has flummoxed its critics and exhilarated its followers. Since January, the exchange rate per bitcoin has skyrocketed, venture capitalists have been spotted skulking through the halls of Bitcoin conferences, and each month there has been an increase in the number of businesses that have added Bitcoin as a payment option. Manu Sporny, chairman of the Web Payments Community Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), spoke at a Bitcoin conference in New York City in late July to put this tiny economy into perspective and to offer some advice. As of August, he said, there would be an estimated 1.6 million active Bitcoin addresses—diddly-squat when you consider the 2.75 billion people plugged into the Internet globally. The lesson? Push to get Bitcoin integrated into Web browsers.