In January, Bitcoin saw a flurry of positive news on a scale that had not happened since May 2011. Bitcoin’s gambling websites, including SatoshiDice, BitZino and Seals With Clubs, all reported record volumes. All three major merchant service providers either expanded their offerings in some way or lowered their fees. Bitcoin’s statistics, including number of transactions, market capitalization and trade volume, were higher than they ever were in history, and those that still remained were higher than at any point after the bubble of 2011. Many people, including myself, predicted that the onslaught of increasing media attention would not last. However, in February we were proven wrong.

Reddit and Kim Dotcom’s Mega, two of the most widely known names in the internet community, started accepting bitcoins for payment, and popular domain name registrar and webhost Namecheap followed suit in March. The Bitcoin price surged past higher than it ever did before, and positive media attention kept on coming. Even the few security crises that Bitcoin had during this time were either ignored or even treated as positive news, with journalists praising the Bitcoin community’s speed and efficiency at handling the issues as they came up.

Here is an overview of all that happened in these past two months.

All Time High!

Just A Little Blockchain Glitch

The BitLC Bitcoin exchange announced that it would be closing since one of the company’s key shareholders, also the holder of the company’s cold storage wallet, disappeared with a large portion of customers’ funds.

BitInstant had its VirWoX account hacked through a combination of social engineering and DNS spoofing, costing them $12,000.

Because of a bug in bitcoind 0.7, the Bitcoin blockchain split into two, with bitcoind and BitcoinQt 0.7 clients on one chain and bitcoind and BitcoinQt 0.8 users, and most others, on the other. The event led to the Bitcoin price temporarily falling from $48.5 to $36.5, but the problem was quickly solved and the price recovered to $45 within a day. A number of news sources reported on the incident, but nearly all were either neutral or even positive, praising the Bitcoin community’s response and the price’s quick recovery.

Business Adoption

eToro, a site that describes itself as the “world’s largest social investing network”, announced that it will soon accept bitcoin deposits.

The Malta-based financial broker Exante announced its new Bitcoin hedge fund, allowing institutional investors to easily and safely invest into the Bitcoin market.

Reddit started accepting bitcoins for its premium Reddit Gold service, becoming the second most popular website after WordPress to accept Bitcoin, and its parent company Advance Publications became the largest company to accept Bitcoin, eclipsing Wuala‘s parent company LaCie (which no longer accepts Bitcoin, likely due to lack of interest).

Kim Dotcom announced BitVoucher, a Mega reseller which allows users to buy Mega’s premium file sharing services for bitcoins. Although Mega was already purchasable for BTC through hosting.co.uk, BitVoucher was significant because it carried Kim Dotcom’s personal endorsement.

Namecheap, a popular domain registrar and seller of web hosting and VPS services, announced that it would accept bitcoins as payment.

WinPoker, a poker site connected to the iPoker network, the largest collection of online poker sites in the world, started accepting Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals.

The Internet Archive announced that it would start paying a portion of some of its employees’ salaries with bitcoins, and received over $1000 in donations during the day following the announcement.

The Finnish software developer SC5 announced that it would start paying employees’ salaried in Bitcoin as well.

Expensify, the world’s most popular application for submitting expense reports, added an option for users to ask for their expenses to be repaid in Bitcoin.

E-Gov Link, a suite of services for local governments seeking to interact with their constituents online, announced Bitcoin integration into their products. “Now municipalities can offer their citizens another option in paying for services like permits, utilities, class or event registration, shelter reservations, or even parking tickets,” the press release reads.

Developments from the Inside

Today, Bitcoin is in that same zone of uncertainty that it was in in the late stages of the run-up to the crash in June 2011. Public interest is continuing, although the focus of media attention has, perhaps unfortunately, slowly shifted from focusing on Bitcoin’s properties to its rapidly increasing value. The price appears to be entering a full-on mania phase, so we should all be prepared for a crash; for those who have earned a small fortune from Bitcoin’s increasing balue already, taking at least once or twice one’s initial investment out is likely the right thing to do, if only to preserve one’s sanity. But in the long term, the future for Bitcoin is looking brighter than ever.

We have seen venture capital investors increasingly looking into Bitcoin, unprecedented Bitcoin adoption with reports of more adoption soon to come, and public attention is increasing on all fronts. Although few believed that this would happen in the bleak months of October and November 2011, over the past two years the Bitcoin economy has grown by a factor of over a hundred.

Just imagine what Bitcoin in the spring of 2015 will be like.