All 70,000 residents living on the Caribbean nation of Dominica will be eligible to receive bitcoin as part of The Bit Drop project, an upcoming collaboration between bitcoin businesses, interest groups and local government officials. Scheduled to take place on 14th March, 2015, The Bit Drop will feature an island-wide party boasting ‘celebrities, musicians and supporters of bitcoin’, as well as education booths and free giveaways. The event will also coincide with Pi Day, an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi).

Speaking to CoinDesk, project manager Sarah Blincoe suggested the ambitious project started with a simple question – How do you get bitcoin into the hands of as many people as possible? From there, she explained, a plan was launched to distribute an undisclosed amount of bitcoin to island residents via text messaging.

While the event has serious goals, Blincoe said the group decided to adopt a lighthearted tone for the project, adding:”Who doesn’t like a party? No one in the Caribbean, that is for sure.” Project partners include bitcoin wallet and merchant processing provider Coinapult, international non-profit College Cryptocurrency Network, women’s industry group Bitcoin Beauties and bitcoin-friendly insurance provider Aspen Assurance.

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Dominica, with its relatively small population and gross domestic product (GDP), proved an ideal location for the event, according to Blincoe.

The country’s high mobile penetration rates, however, may have been the most compelling factor. Blincoe believes Dominica’s smartphone users will be able to solve real-world problems using bitcoin, adding:”The island has opportunities for remittance due to many islanders moving for work to islands as well as the local medical university with students from around the globe. Dominica citizens also face currency exchange issues when traveling to others nearby islands.”

Data from Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL), a regulatory body overseeing telecommunications in Dominica, bolsters this claim, suggesting there were roughly 100,000 mobile subscriptions active in the country in 2012.

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KnCMiner has become the latest bitcoin company to join the ecosystem’s ongoing debate over how bitcoin prices should be displayed. The Sweden-based bitcoin mining company announced on Twitter today that it will now allow users the option to view bitcoin prices in bits on its KnC Wallet app.

The news plays into a growing debate on how bitcoin’s value should be expressed in order to best appeal to mainstream consumers. The price of bitcoin has increased tremendously since bitcoin was introduced five years ago, and as such, early adopters of the digital currency have had to express its values in much smaller units – millibits, microbits or satoshis, for example. 1 BTC is the equivalent of 1,000,000 bits.

As bitcoin has become more and more prominent in the mainstream, some of its users and advocates believe that having a simpler, more comprehensible and more established representation of value could lower the adoption barrier and help put bitcoin skeptics’ fears of price volatility at ease.

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In early May, Georgia-based payments processor BitPay announced its plan to introduce prices expressed in bits on both its website and for its merchant customers.

Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik indicated on the BitPay blog that the transition would make displaying prices more intuitive for consumers and users new to bitcoin, saying:”At a higher level, people are more familiar with prices expressed in numbers extending no more than two decimal places […] This assumption is built into cash registers, spreadsheets, amount input dialogs and basic, person-person real-world transactions.”

Coinbase made the same move the following month, announcing its decision in a June blog post. The San Francisco-based bitcoin financial services startup cited its desire to ensure its platform remains user-friendly as a key reason for the move.

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Reaching the millions of unbanked consumers worldwide has long been a goal of the wider bitcoin industry, but to date, it has struggled to gain users outside of more developed countries. Crossing this awareness gap is the driving force behind Piiko, a prepaid mobile phone top-up service that currently serves consumers with select phone plans in more than 100 countries worldwide, including major markets such as the US, China, Brazil and India.

Launched in April as the first product from Dubai-based bitcoin startup Umbrellab, Piiko is part of the company’s larger plans to court consumers by allowing them to harness the power of bitcoin for everyday utility purchases.

Umbrellab co-founders Tarik Kaddoumi and Sergey Yusupov said, “We started with mobile recharge as there was already a necessity, and the market was ripe in terms of the bitcoin community spending on various services and products worldwide. The plan is to extend into other services such as TV, Internet providers and other types of utility and bill payments that can be paid online, but are currently not accepting bitcoin.”

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Despite its founders’ ambitions, Piiko has faced its share of difficulties, which saw the mobile top-up service relaunch just a few weeks ago after a lengthy blackout period.

Kaddoumi and Yusupov indicated that a third party had previously acted on its behalf, serving as the formal legal partner to the cellphone service providers it works with. In June, however, Umbrellab decided it was time to forge these relationships directly in a bid to cut costs.

With this objective complete, Kaddoumi is optimistic that the service will be able to continue to cater to its already dedicated user base.

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The BitGive Foundation announced today that it has become the first nonprofit bitcoin organization to achieve 501(c)(3) status, meaning the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officially recognizes it as a charitable organisation in the US. This means that any gains made by the foundation will not be taxed, thus directing more money to its supported causes.

BitGive executive director Connie Gallippi told that it is about more than just money, however, “It does give us legitimacy with the US government, which has been a huge struggle for bitcoin as far as businesses are concerned.”

BitGive is dedicated to improving the public health and environment worldwide by giving funds that it raises to various philanthropic organizations and projects. It accepts corporate and individual donations, and counts BitPay, Xapo, LibraTax and Roger Ver among its founding donors.

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Today the foundation also launches two new initiatives: the Founding Donors Campaign and a membership program for individuals. Each is open to donors worldwide.

The new campaign is aimed at one-shot donations from larger groups or companies to help get the foundation’s activity rolling, whereas the membership program is being offered to individuals on an annual basis to support the underlying operations of the organization. Furthermore, in the following year, the foundation plans to offer an annual component to corporations and larger donors.

Gallippi said that the organization’s long-term functionality is to have the equivalent of a multi-million-dollar investment trust, in bitcoin, from which it can give to causes and projects.

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It may be cliché, but perhaps no single word sums up bitcoin quite as well as “disruptive”. Computer scientists have been trying to create secure and sustainable digital cash since the earliest days of the Internet, and until Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper introducing bitcoin was published in 2008, their efforts were in vain.

While the public may still be polarized by the digital currency, most people who take the time to learn about bitcoin and the block chain come to realize the significance of a decentralized, trustless network and the impacts it could potentially have in many areas of everyday life.

The use cases of such a technology are only beginning to be explored, but the bitcoin protocol has already proven to be a game-changer, allowing its users to do things that had previously been thought impractical or even impossible.

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Previous forays into online-based currencies have resulted in failures like e-Gold or centralized currencies often found in gaming communities, but bitcoin is the first digital-only currency that is completely decentralized to gain significant traction. There are many implications of this, but one key value of a decentralized digital currency is that anyone can create a bitcoin wallet to hold their money, without needing to rely on a bank’s approval or their government’s issued currency.

It’s no secret that money transfer services like Western Union and Moneygram are flawed. These companies often take days to transfer money across the globe, and they charge a hefty service fee for their work. Bitcoin, on the other hand, allows anybody with Internet access to send any amount of money anywhere in the world. The notion of smart contracts—contracts that can be digitally created and verified—has been around for years, but is now being approached in a whole new light in the face of bitcoin.

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Given that the design of bitcoin’s peer-to-peer system was partly inspired by gold, it’s not a surprise that many bitcoin enthusiasts are also fans of the precious metal. Both gold and bitcoin are scarce commodities used as stores of value by those who might be distrustful of fiat currencies.

The bitcoin community has long been interested in courting gold users – Ripple, for example, recently introduced gold trading to its platform. Even so, gold enthusiasts have not always been bitcoin champions. Some even go so far as to vocally oppose bitcoin as an investment vehicle.

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It’s important to establish why bitcoin users believe the digital currency could take the place of gold in the global market. One of the main reasons is because some see bitcoin as an investment without the common pain points associated with gold. In addition, significant investment capital pouring into the bitcoin market could make it more valuable than gold. The high-water mark for those who share this value belief took place on 29th November, when the price of bitcoin on then-operational Mt Gox exchange reached a high of $1,242, trading two cents above gold’s $1,241.98 at the time.

That price similarity was short lived, however. Soon after the start of 2014, bitcoin’s price fell due to uncertainty in the Chinese market – along with the collapse of Mt Gox. Despite a brief correlation in price, high volatility is the reason some still think that most gold bugs don’t believe in bitcoin as an investment.

Gold prices fluctuate too, but not as much as bitcoin has this year. BTC has seen an over 62% drop in 2014 after hitting a high of $951.39 in early January down to $360.84 in April.

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