Computer scientists have devised a digital crypto-currency in league with the Bank of England that could pose a devastating threat to large tranches of the financial industry, and profoundly change the management of monetary policy.

The proto-currency known as RSCoin has vastly greater scope than Bitcoin, used for peer-to-peer transactions by libertarians across the world, and beyond the control of any political authority.

This infographic explains the wide ranges of the Bitcoin universe

Naysyers are warning that the recent plunge in Bitcoin prices - from almost $318 at its peak during the Greek crisis, to $221 yesterday - is due to growing power struggle over the future of the cryptocurrency that is dividing its lead developers. On Saturday, a rival version of the current software was released by two bitcoin big guns. As Reuters reports, Bitcoin XT would increase the block size to 8 megabytes enabling more transactions to be processed every second. Those who oppose Bitcoin XT say the bigger block size jeopardizes the vision of a decentralized payments system that bitcoin is built on with some believing the split could spell the end of bitcoin. However, the turmoil in the price also coincides with some rather notable global macro events from Asia (where Bitcoin is extremely popular).

Finally, we note that add that the biggest winner from this is gold

BitGold is the first serious financial services platform ever built around gold. The online service allows users to buy gold, store gold, and pay for goods and services around the world using gold as the currency. The service has been active for less than a week, but has already signed up thousands of users.

For the casual observer the underground online marketplace, often referred to as the DarkNet, seems to resemble the lawlessness of the Wild West. Over the last several years millions of dollars worth of digital crypto-currencies have been stolen, oftentimes by the very operators of the web sites tasked with managing the online digital “hot” wallets of its users. (A “cold” wallet is used to store crypto-addresses on your own Flash drive or can be written down on a piece of paper).

The most recent example comes to us from the “Evolution” Darknet, which according to a report from Crytpo Coins News shut down their web server and ran off with $12 million in user bitcoins:

Worth Wray has written this week’s letter as a summary of what we know about Bitcoin. Delving into its history and bringing us up to date, he also offers a glimpse of the future.