Bitcoin topped the $1,000 mark on the Mt. Gox exchange on Sunday.
The digital currency first hit this mark against the dollar at the end of November, but seismic shifts in China brought the value of Bitcoins crashing back down to less than $500 for a while, prompting someone on the /r/Bitcoin subreddit to post the phone numbers of various suicide hotlines.
That was in mid-December, and prices for Bitcoins have climbed fairly steadily since.
Of course, one needs to factor in the Mt. Gox Premium in these figures, as Bitcoins tend to sell for a bit more on the Japanese exchange.
Recent news from big players in online markets have largely driven the price upward. In December, online retailer Overstock.com announced it would begin accepting Bitcoin payments sometime in the spring. Overstock.com does $1 billion in business annually.
Then, just this week, online games giant Zynga announced it was testing out Bitcoin payments via BitPay. Zynga, a publically traded company, is responsible for all those Farmville updates in your Facebook news feed.
It might also help that a Paul Krugman column in the New York Times trolled Bitcoin fans with an overly provocative headline. (Bitcoin supporters were quick to point out that the Nobel Laureate was on record saying the internet was a passing fad back in 1998.)
And as they say in show business, any press is good press, particularly if it comes from America’s newspaper of record.
At the time of writing, we’re only showing BTC-USD trades at around $936. It’s not a full grand, but it’s still a significant rebound from mid-December.