• Forbes, Thursday, January 23, 2014 10:21 AM

What's Bitcoin, you ask? An online currency originally set up to easily send money around the world, but it recently got sidetracked into something undesirable. Could Google change that perception and use? Overstock.com integrated it as a payment system. Would Google? Kashmir Hill runs down a series of events and iterations with Google that led to this: "Although it hasn't adopted Bitcoin into any of its products, Google has been more Bitcoin-friendly than most other major tech firms. While Apple has not allowed a single Bitcoin client into its iOS app store, dozens of Bitcoin wallets are available for Android. And in 2011, Eric Schmidt said at the Mobile World Congress that the company's co-founders once considered introducing a Bitcoin-like virtual currency called Google Bucks, which he discouraged for regulatory reasons.

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