The price of the digital currency has broken the record set in April 2013, despite the Silk Road bust and fears over security.

The price of one Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $269 on Wednesday, surpassing the previous record of $267 set in April 2013.

Mt. Gox, one of the largest and most well-known sites for exchanging bitcoins with US dollars, reported the record high at 5:40am GMT.

Bitcoin has been steadily increasing in value over the past month, after a long period of relative stability for the highly volatile crypto-currency. At the beginning of October, one BTC was worth $145.

The closure on 2 October of the Silk Road website, which reportedly represented up to 5% of the bitcoin economy, caused a short-term crash in prices, but the currency soon recovered. Since then it has been on a rapid increase, at one point rising by 14% in a single day.

Users and observers of the crypto-currency have many theories about why the increase may have occurred. Some point to the closure of the Silk Road itself, arguing counter-intuitively that by removing a potential PR problem for Bitcoin the FBI has done the currency a favour.

Others argue that the rise is because Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, now accepts payment for some of its services in Bitcoin, giving the currency legitimacy in a new market.

A third possibility is that the rise represents a speculative bubble, akin to that seen in April when the price doubled in a week then plunged to just half of where it had begun. Under that theory, buyers see a small fluctuation and buy in, hoping to make the sort of gains which led to a Norwegian man being able to buy a house four years after a 150 NOK (£15.62) investment in Bitcoin. Those purchases drive the price up, leading to more people buying in hoping to make gains, and so the cycle continues.

Although Mt. Gox is the best-known Bitcoin exchange, its use as a measure of the Bitcoin economy is controversial. It is no longer the most-used, and imposes restrictions on withdrawals which could artificially increase prices.

An index created by the business website Quartz which takes into account a broad spectrum of Bitcoin exchanges shows the price of one coin hovering just below $260; however, this price is not directly comparable with the $267 price from April.

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