2012 has been an exciting year for Bitcoin. We have seen BitPay grow from near-irrelevance to processing transactions for over 2000 merchants around the world, Coinabul expand its gold-selling business from nothing in October 2011 to over 120,000 BTC of gold sold this year, entirely new Bitcoin-accepting businesses like Coindl and the Bitcoin Store open their doors, and hundreds more innovative services, of which there are unfortunately far too many to mention.

Of course, life in the Bitcoin world has been far from perfect. We saw the margin trading service Bitcoinica come crashing down after a series of hacks, all in the tens of thousands of BTC in size, a Ponzi scheme grow to a size of $5 million at its peak before collapsing in August, and Bitcoin exchange Bitfloor lose $250,000 to another thief in September.

However, after these events, the Bitcoin community has begun to take security much more seriously and, among other security upgrades, policies of keeping at least 85% of customers’ assets in offline cold storage have become an industry standard for Bitcoin exchanges. Scams too have become much more difficult to pull off.

Also, in the last two months alone, Bitcoin has gained a large amount of public legitimacy, as popular services like WordPress and 4Chan began accepting it, and Bitcoin Central partnered with a licensed payment services provider in France to integrate its exchange accounts directly into the traditional banking system. And, last but not least, the Bitcoin price itself increased from $4.72 on Jan 1 to $13.51 on Dec 31, a 186% increase.

Now that 2012 is behind us, it’s time to start looking forward to what the Bitcoin community will bring in 2013. There are a considerable number of projects scheduled for release this year. A few of the projects, like ASIC mining computers, have simply been delayed from last year, some are services that accept Bitcoin, several provide ways to use Bitcoin more securely, and still others are new projects entirely. Here is a short list of what 2013 has in store.