A Million is Never Enough, Chinese Laundry, and Bad Taste by Bitcoin

The charges are: knowingly selling bitcoin to Silk Road people for nefarious use, operating an unlicensed currency transmission agency, and not telling the plods that bad things were afoot.

Precisely the sort of thing that high-profile bitcoin names aren't supposed to do.

He'd be wise to dispose of the ring he wears which has his bitcoin password engraved on it - otherwise his nickname 'Four Finger Charlie' may yet come to pass.

More mysteries from the Middle Kingdom - just what's driving some of the more unusual aspects of Chinese bitcoin trading volumes?

The Chinese government's noted equivocation on the subject - at one moment promoting the idea by running educational TV programmes, the next telling the banks they may not trade with bitcoin exchanges - is sometimes explained by the country's other currency problems.

Which, if true, explains both the intensive pressure on bitcoin price being driven by China, and the government's express unease at either closing it down or opening it up.

The potential scale of the forces at work here is hard to comprehend - $4tn is capable of blowing a hole in any country's stability, if not defused carefully, and really would push bitcoin prices out of known space if the above thinking has any basis in reality.

Fancy a flutter? One of the joys of bitcoin is that one can pontificate endlessly on unknowables like Chinese politics, but it's also very easy to make predictions that have a fighting chance of coming true, and remarkably quickly at that.

This week alone has seen Potcoin, which aims to be the currency of choice for captains of cannabis in those markets where weed is legal, and the advent of the Bitcoin Arcade Machine - which shows how easy and cheap it is to add bitcoin functionality to existing stuff.

Even John Law at his most oracular, far-seeing, Nostradamus-nobbling best, failed to predict one particular product, now available for bitcoin.