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If drawing a stack of Benjamins on fast-food napkins and praying they spring to life sounds like your idea of a good time, consider the urban myth behind bitcoin – the enigmatic digital currency that exists online, has no central bank or even a known founder.

Here's what we know, at least from the fabulist perspective: Satoshi Nakamoto is said to have invented bitcoins in 2008 after he sold a vintage McDonald's paper napkin online and the buyer defrauded him out of several thousand bucks. Since then, Nakamoto has been pegged as anyone and everyone from an Irish grad student to a reclusive Hungarian American.

And as the legend grows, so grows the legal tender. Today you'll find an estimated 15 million bitcoins in circulation, worth about $872 million. But putting your money into bitcoins isn't a slam dunk (even if the Sacramento Kings accept them).

That's because bitcoin fever – much like the infamous "Tulip Mania" of 17th Century Holland – has died down. Way down. Observers say once-smitten financial reporters and publications now focus elsewhere.

"Bitcoin is actually unchanged since many years ago: What is different is the focus of the media," says Peter Leeds, the author of "Penny Stocks for Dummies." In it, Leeds mentions bitcoin as an example of what he calls "an investor stampede."

"Much – almost all – of bitcoin's rise in value was driven by the standard media cycle," Leeds says. "And as the story became old news, coverage levels diminished and the currency faded into the background."

But arguably, bitcoin was bound to make headlines in 2013, when European speculators sent its value through the roof. The Cyprus economic bailout drove anxious investors to bitcoins as they sought alternatives to the euro and other currencies manipulated by central bankers.

Bitcoin also made waves because no one in the investment world had seen anything like it.

Bitcoins are known as a "cryptocurrency," a term that appeals to the James Bond in all of us. In fact, early adopters included thieves and criminals who embraced its all-digital nature. Bitcoin's nefarious fans included Silk Road, an online black market (since shuttered) that sold drugs. A handful of anarchists embraced it, too.

That said, old-fashioned cash has long been a favorite of malfeasants. For the rest of us, "the legal status of bitcoin varies from country to country," says Nicolette Kost De Sevres, senior policy advisor with DLA Piper, a global business law firm, "It is banned or restricted in some, undefined in many and explicitly allowed in others."

Adding to the mystery, bitcoins hinge on tongue-twisting technobabble even most Wall Street pundits can't grasp. This includes "source code repository" and the concept of "computationally impractical to reverse." Nor is a bitcoin a coin in the traditional sense. It exists as an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol, which may explain why the digerati have embraced it.

One bitcoin evangelist is Nicolas Cary, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Blockchain, the world's top bitcoin software company. "The virtual currency has specific properties that make it work really nicely as a form of money," Cary says.

Ask him why and he rattles off a long list: "It is counterfeit-proof, fungible, easily divisible by up to 8 decimal points, purely digital, robust against the elements – it won't burn or get corroded in water – and with certain digital precautions far more resilient than cash."

Yes, but… "If you lose the hard drive you've stored your coins on or lose access to a hosted account, you've effectively lost your money," says Cindy McAdam, partner in Goodwin Procter's Technology and Life Sciences Group, and a former executive at Xapo, a leading bitcoin company. And it's not like those things ever happen, right?

If you think you'd be better off spending bitcoins than investing in them, online retailers such as TigerDirect and Overstock.com (ticker: OSTK) accept the currency. You can even make donations with bitcoins at higher-ed institutions that include the University of Puget Sound.

Yet you don't have to be an economics professor to describe bitcoin like this: volatile.

One bitcoin is worth about $581. On Nov. 29, 2013, it hit a peak of $1,108, according to Coinbase.com, a website that tracks Bitcoin prices. Less than a month later, it had plummeted to $593 – more than its current worth. But if you bought in at the start of last September, you'd have doubled your money and then some. It's enough to give even a stalwart market-timing enthusiast a case of virtual currency vertigo.

"There is a belief that much of the 'Wild West' spike in late 2013 was driven by fraud and market manipulation," McAdam says. "The price fell dramatically in the year following that, but has basically been on an upward trend for the past 18 months."

That includes a price bump of $130 over two weeks between late May and early June.

"With the upward price movement, we should expect to see more bitcoin headlines soon," says Anthem Hayek Blanchard, founder and CEO of Anthem Vault, which has created a gold-backed digital currency, HayekGold. He predicts that "it is very likely that bitcoin prices will go higher and breach $1,000 per bitcoin."

Taken one way, the recent price rebound could be interpreted as newfound stability away from the harsh media spotlight. "Some speculate the buying is coming from the Chinese market due to currency controls and a devalued yuan," says Jalak Jobanputra, a venture capitalist and founding partner of FuturePerfect Ventures in New York City.

Or, it could represent the latest gyration in Bitcoin's brief, marble-in-a-bathtub history. So is now a good time to buy bitcoins? Or is it ever a good time to invest in them?

"Bitcoin remains a risky investment," says William Brindise, chief trading officer at DigitalX, a software solutions company in the global digital payments industry.

"If growth in demand remains roughly constant as supply growth falls, economic theory suggests the price of bitcoin should rise," Brindise says. "However that's a big if, since the factors driving demand for bitcoins remain in flux."

Meanwhile, some argue that the current lack of sensationalism means that bitcoin, once an investment upstart, is settling down.

"Bitcoin never went away," says Christopher Burniske, analyst and blockchain products lead at New York City's ARK Investment Management, the first public fund manager to invest in bitcoin. "Its strength can be seen in the 'up and to the right' graphs of transactional volumes, trading volumes, hashing power, number of wallets, startups, merchants, and more, all involved with bitcoin."

Burniske also points to the 99bitcoins website, which tracks bitcoin obituaries in the press. The number to date: 104. He notes that while bitcoin isn't the media darling it once was, it doesn't deserve to be on death row, either.

The truth, in all likelihood, sits securely in the mundane middle.