Bitcoin has seen a surprising amount of attention lately between talking heads appearing on economics shows, Bloomberg, and Financial Times, but what’s really going to drive bitcoin’s attachment in the marketplace isn’t what analysts say about it: it’s how people use it. So this Bitcoin Weekly is dedicated to news about how people intend to use bitcoin—although I’m going to start out by noting this week’s surprising milestone.

Bitcoin value exceeded $200 USD!

Early morning April 9th MtGox trading saw BTC reach its highest value ever and breach the $200 barrier—and as of writing this article BTC is hovering around $250—this has been part of an almost-exponential trend that is curving hard upwards. Only  March 21st the value exceeded $70 and April 3rd it exceeded $140. The value of bitcoins are doubling weekly and the rate seems unstoppable. This greatly increased market volatility (increasing upwards) may be a sign that the cryptocurrency has broken the media barrier and is being noticed even more than ever by the public.

As a result, new customers interested in the value of BTC as a storage of value have been buying in, more merchants have been adding their stamp of approval, and on the cusp of this interest speculators are pulling even more. At its current trend, 1 BTC could reach $1,000 by May—although that’s only wild and woolly gesticulation right now, the thought that it would have risen from $20 in January to over $200 in April.

SimpliSafe chooses bitcoin

Home security systems company, SimpliSafe, felt the need to examine their customer base and how accepting bitcoin could affect their sales—company executives  took to the potential use of cryptocurrency with a skeptic’s eye for the potential flaws and rewards—and in the end decided to accept the currency.

Amid the pros for the currency Cara Giaimo, blogger for SimpliSafe, included lowering costs, giving more anonymity to customers, the opportunity for new customers, and early adoption. The cons included Bitcoin’s current novelty status, the unpredictability of value, handing of refunds/returns, and the current dark-alley reputation painted on bitcoins by pundits. In the end, the pros did win out over the cons, but on a provisional level.

“Accepting bitcoins is a risk, but there is potential for reward,” she writes. “We went through this pro/con exercise in order to see if it was worth a shot. At the end of it, we’re leaning towards developing the ability to accept bitcoins and testing it out for a month. Then, depending on what happens, we’d either keep it as a payment option or kick it to the curb.”

In the article, Giaiamo writes that the company will be using a payment processor such as BitPay or Coinbase for transactions. This should make the unpredictability of value a little bit moot and returns much easier, while also keeping their transaction costs down.

SimpliSafe is yet another example of a business looking into how accepting bitcoins might aid their business. Already Flattr has rumored that they might be getting on board with Bitcoin. The community is making overtures towards Woot and Valve’s steam with limited success; while both Reddit and WordPress have been accepting bitcoins for a while now.

Heyzap delivers option to game developers to accept bitcoins

Game developers have an interesting space they live in when attempting to monetize their apps. As free-to-play MMOs and mobile games move broadly into the open market, it’s important to have a workable microtransaction scheme and as deep an audience as possible. As a result, accepting alternate forms of payment is extremely important—we’ve seen this is true from mobile payments outfit Fortumo.

Now another payments outfit, Heyzap, has opened up bitcoin acceptance to game developers.

Heyzap makes tools that encourage players to promote games via social gamification (such as earning badges, adding check-ins, and other fluff.) The company has recently announced that they’re adding yet-another-incentive for developers to use their service and that is the capability to accept bitcoins.

“We have some developers in countries that don’t accept Paypal, so Bitcoin makes sense to be able to pay them out,” Heyzap co-founder Jude Gomila told VentureBeat. “Also, some developers just want to be paid in Bitcoin rather than USD.”

As we’ve seen with mobile payments, countries such as India, Brazil, China, and others have communities what have little penetration for Paypal or other credit processing. As a result, many customers rely on alternative payment processing and bitcoins could be a potential real market for them.