Happy birthday Bitcoin! Along with the start of January, and a great deal of good news surrounding Bitcoin, there’s been a noticeable resurgence of market price for BTC. In the gaming community Zynga has partnered with BitPay to process bitcoins for virtual items and more Minecraft hosts have done the same. KryptoKit has gotten a number of big names in ownership roles for a Chrome plug-in bitcoin wallet; and AriseBitcoin has put up bulletin boards in San Francisco.

This and more in this week’s Bitcoin Weekly.

Genesis Block birthday—Bitcoin is 5 years old

It’s uncertain whether or not this will become an official Bitcoin “holiday” for the community or not but January 3rd, 2009 is the day the Genesis Block (or Block 0) was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. This was the very beginning of the Blockchain, the central technology that makes Bitcoin function as a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency.

Five years ago, Bitcoin became a real technology with a now and a future. Happy belated birthday, Bitcoin.

Bitcoin market value resurgence

The year 2013 proved to be a banner year for Bitcoin, seeing the currency rise from around $15 at the beginning of the year to exceed $1,200 in November, fall again to around $700 for a while, and now a week into January 2014 the value is once again flirting with $1,000 per BTC.

The significant rise and eventual bang against $1.2k was most likely caused by adoption and speculation in China, and the subsequent fall also likely due to the Chinese government producing documents rumored to greatly restrict Bitcoin in the country. The reality of the situation proved to be a bit weirder and more vague than any sort of outright ban, but the value tumble was quite real.

Much of the analysis of the regained value comes from large corporations making it known that they’re climbing on board with the cryptocurrency. Not too long ago Overstock.com announced the acceptance of Bitcoin; followed shortly by the Facebook causal gaming giant Zynga using BitPay as a payment processor. Rumors of Netflix joining up (pure speculation right now) also joined the whispers and tweets.

Zynga Bitcoin

As a corporation Zynga has repeatedly found itself no stranger to controversy as its meteoric rise to fame and glory being the producer of casual-friendly Flash games for Facebook. As a company, Zynga has seen a glut of notoriety for popularizing the “cow-clicker” with games such as FarmVille, which call upon players to…click cows, wheat, and other elements of a farm as well as invite friends to come visit their farm in order to progress in the game.

To monetize this, Zynga games include an element that allows players to buy into virtual items and quality-of-life services that extend their ability to expand and grow their virtual holding. This is done via microtransactions through Facebook’s payment gateway and, as a result, it’s perfect for a cryptocurrency.

To see how that would work, Zynga is teaming up with BitPay as a Bitcoin payment processor across numerous games.

“In response to Bitcoin’s rise in popularity around the world, Zynga, with help from BitPay, is testing expanded payment options for players to make in-game purchases using Bitcoin,” a Zynga spokesperson announced on Reddit. The Bitcoin test is only available to Zynga.com players playing FarmVille 2, CastleVille, ChefVille, CoasterVille, Hidden Chronicles, Hidden Shadows and CityVille.”

Bitcoin and gaming: Minecraft hosting and Humble Bundle

With Zynga getting onto the Bitcoin bandwagon it makes sense to look at the role of Bitcoin when it comes to gamers. In fact, in the past we’ve reported on BigPoint Games accepting bitcoins for virtual items and now Zynga has shown an interest in adding their own.

As well, gaming hosts have begun to get on board as well. CubedHost recently started accepting Bitcoin for Minecraft servers along with a 5% back incentive.

Just announced, Humble Bundle X is live and accepts bitcoins as payment. This bundle includes To the Moon, Joe Danger 2: The Movie, and Runner2; as for those who exceed the average Reus and Surgeon Simulator 2013 unlock.

Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees and Vitalik Buterin Join KryptoKit in Ownership Roles

A new style for Bitcoin wallets has been released as a Chrome plug-in in the form of KryptoKit. First announced at the Inside Bitcoins West conference, Dec. 10 to 11, in Las Vegas, Nevada the app has since received a five-star rating in the Chrome Web Store—and now has announced adding Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees and Vitalik Buterin as members of the startup in ownership roles. All three luminaries in the Bitcoin community.

“We at KryptoKit are thrilled to welcome these important figures from the Bitcoin world onboard to form our amazing team,” said Anthony Di Iorio, the company’s co-founder along with Steve Dakh. “Roger and Erik are probably two of the top Bitcoin spokespeople in the world and will be working with us on business strategy and other areas.”

KryptoKit is at first glance a web-based Bitcoin wallet that runs inside the Chrome browser. It enables frictionless payments via the web anywhere bitcoins are accepted via an easy-to-use interface. As well as the wallet, it also has a cryptographic messaging service that uses GPG and an identity authentication service.

Bulletin Boards

With the new year also comes some advertisement for Bitcoin as a payment system. Across San Francisco a project called “Arise, Bitcoin!” (http://arisebitcoin.com) has been making Bitcoin known to the residents of SF starting December 27th via billboards.

“Project ‘Hello San Francisco, Hello Bitcoin’ is our first self-funded project intended to introduce new users in the San Francisco bay area to Bitcoin and help provide resources for these users to get started,”

AriseBitcoin writes on their site. “This project also serves as a introduction for Arisebitcoin to the current Bitcoin community in an effort to gain their trust and partnership for future projects.”

The billboards have already been noticed by Reddit users in /r/bitcoin leading to photos (1, 2) of the advertisements flying alongside the road.

The signs, which are a bit minimalistic and sport a QR code, have already drawn some criticism for lacking any information related to Bitcoin.

“They would get much more traffic to there website if they had a sign that said ‘P2P. Decentralized. Digital. Cash. Be your own bank’ and then have a link to their website would get way more visitrs [sic],” notes Chakra_Scientist on Reddit.

Statistics on the campaign have already been partially published, as well as information on the second project that will take place in New York City and include the transit system.