Cryptocurrency Round-Up: State of Bitcoin; Buttcoin.org Sale & the Crypto-Candidate

• Bitcoin Price: £363.03 (via CoinDesk.com)

Bitcoin's price has dropped in the last 24 hours back to the same $620 (£361) mark it held on Friday, having spiked briefly over the weekend to $635.

Elsewhere on the cryptocurrency markets similar results were observed with the next five most valuable coins (my market cap) all saw drops in price of 2.2% and 5.4%.

Bucking the trend is Bytecoin, which is one of the first altcoins based on the CryptoNote technology which promises both even-more-anonymous transactions and ASIC-proof mining. In the last 24 hours Bytecoin's value jumped 12.8% making it the seventh most valuable mineable cryptocurrency.

Price continues to dominate the bitcoin debate

CoinDesk has published its latest quarterly State of Bitcoin report which says that despite all the innovation around the cryptocurrency, most of the debate continues to focus on the price.

Of course in the second quarter of 2014, that is not much of a surprise as the cryptocurrency's value bounced back by almost 40%.

The reasons given for the price spike in the report are the stabilising of the regulatory situation in China and continued interest in bitcoin by big brands like Apple, Expedia, eBay and Dish.

Buttcoin.org website sold to Butterfly Labs

You may not have heard of the Buttcoin.org website, but for many it was a source of telling-it-how-it-is honesty in a bitcoin world which was full of constant optimism.

Buttcoin.org was sold for a five figure sum to Butterfly Labs, a bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer, by its creator Evan who spoke to TechCrunch:

"I don't want to go to specific into the terms of the sale due to some language in the contract that's tricky but it was a hair into the 5 figure range, yes. Nothing to change anything about my life or anything, but enough to fix some stuff around the house," said Evan, former owner of Buttcoin who preferred not to reveal his last name.

"The site was a PR4 and had decent traffic for a blog of that type but I would have been dumb to not take the offer. I have bought and sold websites before and knew this was an overvalued offer. However, since I had been following bitcoiners for so long I knew most of these guys did transactions that made zero financial sense so it didn't seem too unbelievable."

Butterfly Labs had been the focus of a lot of online debate over issues with its hardware, and Buttcoin.org had been among the most vocal of these dissenters.

The Cryptocurrency Candidate

While the US is still debating how to deal with bitcoin, one candidate in an up-coming election is looking to bring that debate to the fore by saying he will run his entire campaign using donations made in bitcoin.

Dan Elder, a US House candidate in the 1st Congressional District of Missouri made the announcement that his campaign website now only accepts bitcoin donations - following a decision by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in May to allow in-kind donations in bitcoin, with a limit of $100.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Elder said: "I'm accepting BTC donations to solely fund my campaign to take a stance against the Federal Reserve and its policies which have weakened the US dollar."

While some candidates in the US have previously accepted bitcoin, Elder is the first to run his campaign entirely using cryptocurrency.