1. It’s been a crazy ride for Bitcoin investors, lovers and users around the world. Bitcoin has seen a steady rise in its pricing since Jan 2013 and if you look closely at various Bitcoin charts like Clarkmoody, it shows a high of USD 33.20 or MYR 99. With plenty of positive news, where major websites (Reddit, 4chan, WordPress and Mega) are adopting the Bitcoin Payment system, demand for bitcoin grows on a daily basis and this pushes the price even further north.

I foresee the price of Bitcoin going beyond MYR 500 by the end of 2013 due to the natural limited supply of Bitcoin.

2. While surfing the net earlier, an interesting argument of block size limitation and transactions per second (tps) came up on this site.

Equally there is a challenge, as pointed out to me last week, that the total processing capability for the coins is maxed out at seven transactions per second (tps). This is a constraint created by validating the coins as they are processed, and creates a hard block size limit for coin traffic. It means that Bitcoins cannot be used for more than about 360,000 transactions per day, or 2,500 transactions every ten minutes.

By contrast VISA handles around 2,000 tps on average, with a daily peak rate of 4,000 tps. They have capacity for over 10,000 tps to handle the busiest holiday periods where transactions regularly reach 8,500 per second.

Bitcoin’s 7 tps compared to 10,000 with VISA is a bit of a chasm, although Bitcoin would not claim to be a VISA. They do compare their targets to PayPal. PayPal handles around 4 million transactions per day for an average of 46 tps or a peak rate of around 100 tps.

3. Meanwhile, enjoy the video of a working Bitcoin ATM (Liberty Forum) that collects US dollars and dispenses Bitcoin to your smartphone. Too bad it doesn’t do the reverse by accepting Bitcoin and spitting out cash. Let’s hope they come to Malaysia soon.