One day last summer, a man claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, barged into CoinDesk's London office and started ranting to the staff about the "power of my creation."

"It was pretty awkward, he was there for about five minutes and looked like he wasn't going to leave," recalls Emily Spaven, managing editor at CoinDesk. "Needless to say, I'm 110% sure he wasn't Satoshi."

Incidents like this come with the territory for the reporters and editors at CoinDesk. The online publication launched in May 2013 to cover all things Bitcoin just as the cryptocurrency's price was starting to spike and receive mainstream media attention. CoinDesk has since established itself as the paper of record for the Bitcoin world, covering price fluctuations, funding announcements, regulatory issues and the big personalities in the space. It now has about 700,000 monthly unique readers, according to Spaven, and generates revenue from ads and, starting this year, Bitcoin events.

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At a time when many media startups are raising significant funding to cover anything and everything, CoinDesk has found early success targeting a single, relatively niche area of technology news. One might compare it to the many websites that solely write about Apple. The difference is that the volatility and unknowns that make Bitcoin fascinating could also threaten the stability of a publication like CoinDesk that primarily covers Bitcoin.

Shakil Khan, an angel investor who has worked with Path and Spotify, came up with the idea for CoinDesk after a number of entrepreneurs and investors asked him about the currency, at least in part because of his investment in BitPay, a bitcoin payment processing startup. (He has refrained from investing in other bitcoin startups because of his investment and role in CoinDesk.)

"When many of those people started asking me whether they needed to get involved with Bitcoin, I knew there was an opportunity to create the definitive source of information on the topic," Khan told Mashable in an email. That said, he argues that CoinDesk is less a bet on Bitcoin than on digital currencies in general. "We never knew whether Bitcoin itself would be a winner in the long run, but felt that currency was increasingly going digital."

After recognizing the need for a Bitcoin news service, Khan quickly recruited people like Spaven, who had worked with him on a much different media property called Buy to Let, which provided news and tips for U.K. landlords.

"Excuse me, what is Bitcoin?" Spaven said after hearing about Khan's plan for CoinDesk. Her family thought the entire Bitcoin industry was "ludicrous," but she still agreed to take the job. "There's way more interesting people in this than there were in traditional finance. There are some absolute lunatics," she said. Sure enough, one of her first assignments was to attend a conference where she met Charlie Shrem, the Bitcoin entrepreneur who would later be arrested for his connection to Silk Road.

While Spaven enjoys the coverage and now helps oversee a staff of 15-20 part-time and full-time employees around the world, she admits it is "strange" to cover an industry that her career currently depends on.

On the day we talk, the average price of Bitcoin has crashed below $200 for the first time since October 2013 when CoinDesk was just a few months old. That sharp drop in Bitcoin prices — like the equally dramatic spikes in prices more than a year earlier — inevitably drive more readers to CoinDesk. But it also once again raises concerns about the long-term viability of Bitcoin and those businesses, including CoinDesk, that have sprouted up around it.

"You kind of have to put it to one side to make sure the coverage you give is as it should be," Spaven says. "Obviously we only exist because [Bitcoin] is out there... Put it this way: the majority of my life's savings are in a traditional bank account, not bitcoin. Thank God, given the recent fall in price."

The team at CoinDesk has had many discussions about whether and how to broaden coverage beyond digital currencies, perhaps branching out to payments and the financial-technology area in general. The risk, Spaven says, is that CoinDesk would then have to compete against larger media companies already covering these subjects.

For now, CoinDesk is still all in on digital currency.

[Disclosure: I own one bitcoin.]

BONUS: What Is Bitcoin?