Bitcoin price could be highway robbery and how to stop a nasty rumour

Bitcoin's price keeps going up, and nobody knows quite why.

They're being quite careful, too, with every ransom going to a different bitcoin address, and running their main servers out of the Ukraine and on the Tor network.

Is this one of the factors driving the bitcoin price up? Well, with well over 200,000 bitcoins traded per day at the moment - a very large increase on a week ago - it's certainly feasible that a good chunk of those is panicked hostage traffic.

Mt. Gox, which had just lost its crown as top exchange to BTC China, has roared back into the lead - as you might expect for an exchange with multiple currencies, if lots of people from around the world suddenly needed bitcoin in a hurry.

If bitcoin is widely adopted and people get used to spending it directly with people they don't know, then why go through PayPal?

If eBay refuses to allow bitcoin for auction payments, which would win? Ebay is lovely, but probably not bigger than a global currency.

Best case - from PayPal's point of view - is if bitcoin just goes away quietly.

Then there's all that other stuff that people want to do with bitcoin - merchant services, safe deposit boxes, easy to use walletry - which upstarts like Circle are very publicly going for.

There's no reason, once bitcoin is on firmer regulatory ground, that PayPal couldn't do some or all of that, and help keep lots of transaction profit in-house for its eBay masters while providing useful amounts of profits on top.

Not because the writers can't hack complex stuff, but really, there's the Twitter IPO. There's the bitcoin price hike! There's Silk Road 2.0!