Bitcoin news only got brighter today with a breaking development from Bigpoint–a well-known massively-multiplayer online (MMO) gaming developer who cater to an audience of millions–announcing the acceptance of bitcoins for virtual items. Virtual worlds, gaming, and spaces that exist primarily online and already trade in virtual currencies and virtual goods are a perfect market for BTC due to the already-virtual and already-global nature of gaming.

On top of that, this weekend the Bitcoin network exceeded 1 petahash a second of processing power–a growth of almost 40x what it had been seeing in Janudary.

And, Armory Technologies–the group behind the Armory Bitcoin Wallet–have raised $600k in an investment round to make their wallet even better than before.

Browser-based MMO Developer Bigpoint Bets Big With Bitcoin

German online game developer Bigpoint has shifted to allowing users to purchase virtual in-game items with bitcoins. As a video game developer, the company has been huge in the free-to-play market where games are released for free to giant audiences and money is made by publishers through selling virtual items in the games themselves—this has long been touted as the perfect place for a virtual currency (such as Bitcoin) to be the go-to-currency.

CoinDesk broke the story this morning about the addition quoting Khaled Helioui, CEO of Bigpoint, “When you think about it, since our business revolves around virtual goods, it makes sense for us to implement the most popular virtual currency as a payment method.”

Bigpoint has been a big player in the browser-based free-to-play gaming market and boasts over 330 million users with games including Battlestar Galactica Online, DarkOrbit, and Drakensang Online. Gamers who play strategy, action, and MMORPGs have already gotten used to spending real money for virtual money such as in-game gold or premium currency used to purchase in-game items that the transition from using the normal money to BTC shouldn’t be difficult.

BitPay has become the bitcoin processor for Bigpoint, adding yet-another-feather to BitPay’s already swelling cap in the bitcoin-payment market. Benefits of BitPay and Bitcoin being added to Bigpoint’s portfolio include increasing the total audience of gamers who can play the games—by making it possible for people who otherwise couldn’t spend money capable of buying items—but also through saving costs. Using processors such as Paypal and credit cards means giving huge cuts for processing that are greatly reduced by most BTC processors.

This is an awesome achievement for the Bitcoin community especially when we add that Bigpoint has licensed with HBO to host the upcoming MMORPG Game of Thrones Online. Judging by how popular Game of Thrones is as a book series and a TV series, this will bring a flood of customers right to Bigpoint’s door and even more people will be exposed to the potential of using BTC for virtual items and online transactions.

Bitcoin Network Speed Exceeds 1 Petahash per Second

Over the weekend, the Bitcoin protocol network reached an astonishing milestone: it exceeded 1 petahash per second. The Genesis Block has run an amazing historical perspective of the BTC network processing power and how we’ve gotten from then until now. A petahash is a lot of computing power–that’s 1,000,000 GH/s or 10^15 hashes a second–and with the peer-to-peer design of Bitcoin, it’s distributed between a lot of nodes. This is over 40x faster than what was running at the beginning of the year.

This almost astronomical growth can be attributed to the rise of mining technology over the years. According to The Genesis Block, the Bitcoin community has seen a series of eras starting with the invention and introduction of Bitcoin where people just used CPUs to audit and mine the Blockchain, this quickly gave way to GPU mining (due to the computational power of GPUs optimized for matrix math and hashing.) In 2011, specialized hardware began to take shape and this started to form the backbone of the mining community–only at 2 TH/s mining was still just getting going–and that was the introduction of FPGAs or field programmable gate arrays.

Things really hit their stride in 2012 when the ASIC miner (or  application-specific integrated circuits) became the the rage and companies to produce them started to rise. Now-infamous Butterfly Labs began taking orders and the hash rate had hit 5/GHs. The addition of ASIC began what TGB calls “the ASIC arms race” that meant bigger-better-badder chips and miners reaching the market and people using the chips to roll their own miners and build pools.

2013 started at 25 TH/s and it has brought us to the point where it’s just barely exceeded 1 PH/s (or 1,000 TH/s).

Armory Technologies–creators of the Bitcoin Armory Wallet–raise $600k

Well-known encrypted wallet makers Armory Technologies has finished a seed round investment with $600,000 from Bitcoin pioneer Trace Mayer and Kevin Bombino and Jim Smith. Bitcoin Armory is a Bitcoin wallet and client that is open source and uses encryption to protect the valuable information stored within.

Recognizing the need for greater security than ever when it comes to keeping Bitcoin wallets safe, Amory is an excellent addition to the number of wallets that currently exist. To make it even better: Armory is a free product.

Armory is already extremely feature-rich and user friendly–however, the community is in constant need of reliable and highly functional software. As a result, new features are planned in development with this seed money.

New features will include support for hardware wallets and multi-signature transactions. This will open the door for enterprise level Bitcoin security by requiring that at least two or more people or devices (depending on corporate policies) approve every transaction. The next version will include functionality to create fragmented backups that can be stored in multiple locations for increased physical security.

Trace Mayer commented, “Bitcoin is still in beta but time is important. We need to push forward development of advanced, complex and powerful cryptographic tools. Alan is among the best in the world at what he does and his fruit, Armory, is the best of breed Bitcoin wallet, open-source and a free application. While there is no immediate plan for how to monetize Armory, nevertheless, I feel confident in Alan’s ability to continue adding tremendous value to the Bitcoin ecosystem that greatly benefits all of us who use Armory to secure our financial rights in Cipherspace. After all, Bitcoin is the innovative spearhead of creative destruction of the financial and monetary systems.”