The volatile rise and fall of Bitcoins has prompted lots of stories explaining why the online virtual currency is a classic bubble. Many compare it with Tulipmania in 17th Century Holland, where the prices of rare tulip bulbs soared to absurd heights and then crashed, ruining the speculative investors who had bought them. But the Bitcoin phenomenon is more than a bubble. It says something important about the current and future state of the global economy.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the brothers who sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for $140million, alleging that he stole the idea for elements of the social network from them, claim to have as much as $11million invested – or had, as the last two days have seen a dramatic popping of the bitcoin bubble.

Wow, Bitcoin really needs a PR department to help people craft what they say to the press so they do not come off like some NBA players on twitter.   Please be careful with your quotes (remember they are not going to use the 20 smart things you say, only the one slip up you make) for their goal is to make you sound greedy, crooked or strange.   
That "Bitcoin's Jesus" spent time in jail for selling explosives as "retribution" from a government that feared the 2% of votes he got in an election -- even makes a rabid supporter like me cringe.

The surge in a Bitcoin’s value has made millionaires out of people who loaded up on them early on—however briefly. Many of them are self-described libertarians, drawn by the idea of a currency that exists outside the control of governments. Some were so taken with the concept that they launched Bitcoin businesses, such as exchanges where people can buy the coins or exchange them for dollars.

what's the name of the bar. I live and work in NYC. I'd be happy to stop by.

On Sunday, EVR bar and lounge in New York will start accepting Bitcoins for drinks and food. “We have to train all the waitresses,” says Charlie Shrem, a partner at the club.

They may not have invented Facebook, but twin tech entrepreneurs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss — better known to the world as the Winklevoss twins, or Winkelvii — are deep into the next big online trend. The brothers claim to have amassed one of the largest portfolios of Bitcoin in the world, worth around $11 million, or about 1 percent of the entire currency's dollar value equivalent...

I've downloaded the list of all trades executed on Mtgox over the past 24 hours (there's an API URL for that), and wrote a tiny script to count the number of trades during every 1-minute interval.

Turns out, the single worst minute saw SIX trades per second. The top 15 worst 1-minute intervals saw an average of 3.8 trades per second.

Let's try to estimate how many trades per second their engine is capable of. The worst lag I saw over the past 24 hours was about 500 seconds, i.e. 8 minutes. Let's simplify this a lot, and assume that this lag was created after the worst 1-minute interval, when Mtgox saw 370 trades. In the most conservative scenario, a lag of 8 minutes would mean that these 370 trades took 7 minutes to execute (this is a bit of an approximation, but I think it's close enough).

That gives us an upper bound on Mtgox trading engine speed of just 0.9 trades per second.

This is so ridiculous that I have to wonder if I made a mistake somewhere. But if I didn't, their trading engine was written by monkeys (something that everyone seems to agree on anyway).

and a classic closing line

From the newspaper that brought you “How to spend it”, we now bring you “How to spend it: bitcoin edition”.

Looking for a guitar, a new Samsung tablet, or even some real estate? Open up that digital wallet and fork over your virtual currency.

As bitcoin’s value spiked after the Cyprus bailout, some observers assumed that people would hoard their stashes in typical speculator fashion. If it was worth $100 a week ago and it’s $200 today, it must be worth hanging on to see if $300 is in the cards. Nobody will spend something that is appreciating so quickly.

But it turns out that, as Patrick Testagrossa, owner of ecommerce site Bitcoinblaster.com, can attest, people who suddenly carry buying power start exercising it.