Cryptocurrency round-up: Bitcoin could offer 'real net neutrality' and 10,000 Spanish ATMs

• Bitcoin price: $277.89 (£183.90, €255.62) via CoinDesk.com

There have been steady price gains for bitcoin over the weekend, rising by around $10 since Friday to take its value up towards $280. Litecoin, darkcoin and dogecoin also saw modest gains of between 1% and 3% to continue their recent positive market movement.

The biggest increase from any cryptocurrency came from pandacoin, the "easy-to-understand" altcoin that offers users 2.5% annual interest for storing the cryptocurrency through its PandaBank. A 40% price rise took pandacoin's market cap above $150,000.

Bitcoin could offer 'real net neutrality'

The technology that powers bitcoin could provide a solution to the issue of net neutrality, according to Coin Center's director of research.

Peter Van Valkenburgh suggested in a recent opinion piece in Wired that micropayments and encryption could provide a way to effectively use the internet connectivity of personal WiFi routers without compromising a user's privacy or bandwidth availability.

To achieve this network traffic would need to be encrypted to ensure privacy and routers would need to be programmed to seek the fastest connection to the larger internet through its nearby peers, thus forming a mesh network. Micropayments would also need to be set up to charge those using the routers.

"Telecoms may balk at this plan," Van Valkenburgh said. "It's potentially disruptive, moving their revenue model from high-margin consumer entertainment services to low-margin utility provisioning for a neighbourhood.

"Bitcoin and the low-transaction-costs that automated micropayments can provide are the keys to building these better markets, which will ultimately unlock net neutrality itself."

10,000 bitcoin-enabled ATMs

A network of 10,000 cash machines in Spain has enabled bitcoin-to-cash withdrawals following a landmark agreement.

National bank Banc Sabadell, Banco Popular, Abanca and EVO Bank have agreed with BTCPoint to allow bitcoin service integration into its ATM units.

"Once you send your bitcoin to our address, you'll receive a text message with a code and with that code you can go to any ATM and receive cash right away," BTC co-founder Alex Lopera told CoinDesk.

"If we wanted to scale and become global, it makes more sense to really go after banks. They already have the infrastructure."