Business Bringing Bitcoin Legitimacy, Potential Regulation

Earlier this year, the US Marshals Service auctioned 30,000 bitcoins confiscated in the FBI’s bust of the Silk Road online marketplace. Estimated at $17.4 million, they were all bought by one bidder.
To the delight of Jon Matonis, executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation, the Marshals’ auction proves that bitcoin is fungible, that it possesses a ‘market-based legitimacy.’
Further, the buyer was Tim Draper, of venture capital fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In spite of the cryptocurrency’s relatively low price for most of this year, Draper has reiterated his ‘pessimistic’ target price for bitcoin in three year’s time: $10,000. (A bitcoin can be exchanged for a bit more than $400 as of this posting.)
Draper isn’t the only Wall Street type seeing money in this new type of money. A growing number of professional investors, private equity firms and venture capitalists have been working to institutionalize bitcoin.

This post was published at Forbes on 9/25/2014.