Bitcoin extended Monday’s rally, rising sharply at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time to on volume of 6,833 Bitcoin, ultimately reaching a high of $108 Tuesday evening, at least on the Mt. Gox exchange. However, as the previous post indicated, the price differential between Mt. Gox and other exchanges remains abnormally wide, and Bitcoin rose to only $97.50 on Bitstamp, with most of the other exchanges also indicated a price still somewhat below the $100 threshold that appeared to be important to traders at the Mt. Gox exchange. On Virtex, a Canadian Bitcoin exchange, the price for Bitcoin was only C$90 while Mt. Gox quoted C$106, a C$16 difference, so clearly the rally this week at Mt. Gox may not be fully representative of Bitcoin prices unless you are a Mt. Gox customer.

Another popular exchange, Coinbase, has hired the founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, onto the Coinbase team. Previously employed with Google Play Games, YouTube, and Google Chrome OS, he has already added 2-step verication to logging into your Coinbase account via Google Authenticator and/or Authy’s voice support feature to verify your phone number. His hiring has led some to speculate that Coinbase may soon add Litecoin functionality, though that is by no means certain. Litecoin may not be worth adding to Coinbase, as the market capitalization is only around $50M, a far cry from the popularity of Bitcoin.

Also following up on the news from Thailand last night, it appears to have been similarly subjected to overblown speculation, as many commentators pointed out, somewhat less quickly than new articles were published, that Bitcoin was not actually outlawed in Thailand. Rather, the Bank of Thailand had apparently advised a nascent Bitcoin exchange that there were not yet any rules set forth for the usage of Bitcoin, and thus it could not operate in any official capacity as a currency in trade with the Bank of Thailand. Nonetheless, a number of headlines leaped out to proclaim that Thailand had banned Bitcoin outright, which is clearly not what occurred in the exchange’s decision to temporarily suspend operations while it awaits further guidance from the Bank of Thailand.