Bitcoin round-up
A market-wide recovery has seen the value of bitcoin surge above and beyond $500. IBTimes UK

The price of bitcoin has bounced back to above $500 (£298) and continues to rise, taking with it all other major altcoins as uncertainty surrounding cryptocurrencies in China subsides.

The deadline for Chinese banks to end their financial relationship with bitcoin exchanges passed yesterday with no further action taken.

The remarkable recovery from last week's crash has seen bitcoin's value increase by over 50% from $355 to as high as $542 in just five days.

Following its recent venture to space, dogecoin has seen its own market capitalisation shooting for the moon, increasing by 56% in the last 24 hours and making it the best performing major altcoin coming out of the China crisis.

MtGox files for liquidation

The defunct Japanese bitcoin exchange MtGox has reportedly given up on trying to rebuild and has instead filed for liquidation with a Japanese court.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal has reported that the complexity of reestablishing the exchange under bankruptcy protection has meant that the end of the embattled exchange is finally here.

Once the world's busiest bitcoin exchange, MtGox collapsed in February amid claims that it had been robbed of around 850,000 bitcoin.

5,000 TerraMiners sold

Terraminer

Less than 10 weeks after launching, the cryptocurrency mining machine TerraMiner has been shipped over 5,000 times.

CoinTerra, the mining hardware manufacturer that builds the TerraMiner, has claimed that its machines now power 6% of the bitcoin network.

"Deploying eight petahash to the bitcoin network in just ten weeks is an unprecedented achievement," said Ravi Iyengar, CEO of CoinTerra. "As well as thanking the CoinTerra team, now that we are shipping from stock I wanted to give a big thank you to the entire bitcoin community."

Coin of Sale POS gathers momentum

A new point of sale (POS) system for bitcoin has been gaining attention for its simplistic way of working.

Coin of Sale works on both Android and iOS operating systems through an app that includes an Electrum wallet.

The person selling the goods or services only has to enter the amount to be charged and a QR code is automatically generated to be scanned by the customer.

Killing Bitcoin by 'taxing it to death'

Based on her own experiences of filing a tax return, Forbes writer Kashmir Hill believes that the way the US government is dealing with bitcoin at the moment is not helping the cryptocurrency gain widespread adoption.

The complexity of the bitcoin tax filing system, which takes into account the varying value of the digital currency on various days, led her accountant to say: "The government's going to kill Bitcoin by taxing it to death."

Hill added:

"Life may be more complicated for other bitcoin types, such as high-frequency Bitcoin traders (whose list of Bitcoin transactions will be much longer than mine) and especially for any Americans running a mining pool; those are the guys that rope a bunch of people's computers together for a Bitcoin botnet and split the Bitcoin pay-out between the "miners" (who should really be called "accountants") for doing the tracking of transactions that makes the network work."

Bitcoin China