The combined value of all Bitcoins in circulation surpassed $1 billion this Thursday, as the exchange rate for each individual unit of the encrypted digital currency rose above $92. The milestone comes as the total number of Bitcoins nears 11 million and represents a huge jump from the record value of $32 recorded just one month ago. At the time of writing, the currency’s market capitalization has dipped back below the billion mark, but small ups and downs are not uncommon — the current rate listed on Mt. Gox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange, is still well above $90.

Bitcoin’s rise has not been without problems

While meteoric, Bitcoin’s rise has not been without problems — regular hacking attempts and other technical issues continue to damage the currency’s reputation, particularly in the eyes of major institutional investors. “I just don’t feel comfortable getting involved with something vulnerable to being hacked or manipulated, and with no recompense if it is,” one portfolio manager tells IEEE Spectrum. Bitcoin’s status as the currency of choice for all sorts of nefarious online activity, from piracy to drug dealing, hasn’t helped either.

The currency’s most recent price rise is partly attributable to an automatic inflation safeguard triggered in November, when the total number of Bitcoins reached 10.5 million — this system cut the rate that new coins can be minted, or “mined,” by half, quickly bumping up their value. But while organs such as The Economist are skeptical about the price’s sustainability, it’s hard to deny that it represents a swell of optimism among Bitcoin users themselves.

Nokia has explicitly ruled out licensing a set of video patents under royalty-free or FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms, potentially blocking efforts by Google to make its VP8 codec, part of the broader WebM project, a worldwide standard. In a submission to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), one of the international bodies responsible for administering web standards, the Finnish company lists 64 patents and 22 pending applications that it claims are relevant to VP8 and makes it clear that it will not be willing to give Google — or any other interested party — a free ride.

VP8 was originally developed by On2 Technologies

The move comes barely two weeks after Google entered into a licensing agreement with MPEG LA, another company claiming to own patents infringed by VP8 — while financial details were not disclosed, Google gained the right to sublicense the patents to third parties, with the agreement covering all previous generations of the codec as well as the next generation, VP9. In a statement given to FOSS Patents, a Nokia spokesman describes the company’s latest actions as an “unusual step,” but claims that it is necessary to prevent Google from “forc[ing] the adoption of its proprietary technology, which offers no advantages over existing, widely deployed standards such as H.264.”

VP8 was originally developed by On2 Technologies and was acquired by Google in 2010, soon becoming part of the WebM project. The battle between H.264 and WebM has been raging ever since — this time last year, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich criticized Google for reneging on a commitment to remove H.264 support from its Chrome browser, while Microsoft accused the company of attempting to “kill video on the web” after it refused to change certain Motorola licensing policies around the codec.

TechCrunch has published an engrossing piece covering the full history of Google’s controversial Street View project, from its early days as a camera stuck on Larry Page’s car to its current globe-spanning magnitude. Most interesting are stories of the project’s gradual acceptance within the company — it’s easy to forget that, when Street View was first conceived, Google Maps had yet to be launched. The idea was first pursued by a group of employees using Google’s famous “20 percent time” and was only announced internally in the third quarter of 2005, when the search giant’s expansion into location-based services had barely started. Head over to TechCrunch to find out how Street View’s uncanny ability to “teleport” users helped it to grow into one of Google’s most recognizable products.

NASA released a slew of new, high-resolution images of Mercury yesterday, offering unprecedented detail of the planet’s crater-filled surface. Produced in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), the images are based on data collected by the Messenger spacecraft, launched back in August 2004, and include both an eight-colour mosaic of the planet’s entire surface and a higher-quality monochrome version, shown above.

The APL has made the images available on the Messenger site, but some — notably the full, 144MB colour mosaic — are currently throwing up a “Not Found” error. Thankfully, NASA is also hosting most of the major images through its Messenger QuickMap tool, which provides a map-style interface allowing users to zoom in and out. As well as the overall pictures, it’s worth checking out Messenger’s detailed images of Mercury’s polar regions, which previous observations have shown to host ice and organic materials.

When developer Lab Zero Games launched an Indiegogo campaign for updates to its Skullgirls fighting game last week, some fans were outraged — the company asked for a cool $150,000 to add one new character to the title. But as an insightful piece from Giant Bomb points out, the outcry was accompanied by a surge of donations, with the total currently standing at more than $275,000. The episode points to a divide in the gaming community: while some users and developers understand the real costs of high-quality game production — costs which were set out by Lab Zero in an itemized list on their campaign site — many have become habituated to a world where content is cheap and distinctions between mainstream and independent developers are difficult to discern. Head over to Giant Bomb to read the full story.

Since its Netflix debut on February 1st, the political drama House of Cards has prompted a wave of binge-viewing, with Kevin Spacey’s machiavellian Majority Whip Frank Underwood proving hugely popular. Now, an enterprising writer-director duo has transported Underwood from one nest of political intrigue to another, taking him off Capitol Hill and placing him at the heart of the Vatican.

An extremely well-made spoof trailer, House of Cardinals was uploaded to YouTube yesterday and is the work of Jon Deutsch and Ross Cohen. Predictably, it follows Underwood as he attempts to capture the papal throne following Benedict XVI’s recent resignation. While the video’s irreverent tone and sensitive subject matter won’t suit all tastes, it’s hard to deny that it’s a pitch-perfect parody, with star Tony Pasqualini even capturing Spacey’s decidedly ropey Southern accent. “Take a step back. Look at the bigger picture. That’s how you become Supreme Pontiff.”