When you can buy a round of drinks at the local with something that can't be seen let alone held, you know bitcoin has made it.

That, or it's the world's most elaborate pyramid scheme.

The Old Fitzroy pub in Woolloomooloo, Sydney and the Grumpy's Green, coincidentally in Fitzroy, Melbourne, many small businesses and big online retailers from Amazon to Zappos accept bitcoins as payment.

 Flash your phone with its pre-loaded electronic wallet at the till so the two swap computer codes and the drinks are yours.

Never one to miss a trend, billionaire Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic accepts bitcoin for your next outer space holiday.

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Online retailer Showroomprive.com has become the largest European company to start accepting payment in bitcoin.

The merchant, which sells a variety of products including clothes, fashion accessories, cosmetics and homeware, is to accept bitcoin via European cryptocurrency company Paymium.

Gonzague Grandval, co-founder and CEO of Paymium, labelled the move as a "major event for e-commerce in Europe".

Showroomprive.com, which is based in Paris and was founded in 2006, registered a €350m turnover in 2013.

Having raised $46.9m in funding in 2010, the company now employs more than 600 people.

Thierry Petit, Showroomprive.com co-CEO and co-founder, said: "To integrate bitcoin as a new payment option, we had to find a reliable bitcoin payment solution that could also convert bitcoins to local currencies in all the countries where Showroomprive.com operates."

Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam certainly look like the kind of guys who could help bitcoin recover from its wild years.

They are tall and textbook fit, and as poised as Swiss bankers -- Vulcan Swiss bankers.

Armstrong, 31 and a former software engineer at Airbnb Inc., shaves his head. Ehrsam, 26 and a former foreign-exchange trader at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS:US), keeps his hair short and very much in place. When they discuss bitcoin, they rarely smile. Do not try to make them laugh.

Their seriousness is understandable, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its November 2014 issue. Armstrong and Ehrsam are the founders of a startup called Coinbase Inc. (0776164D:US), whose mission is to convince everyone that bitcoin isn't an Internet scam or a libertarian plot against the government or a digital version of goldbuggery, as various skeptics have it. Rather, it's the best thing to happen to money since the Lydians started minting coins sometime in the seventh century B.C.

A Magna Carta for Bitcoin  

Online retailer Showroomprive.com has become the largest European company to start accepting payment in bitcoin.

The merchant, which sells a variety of products including clothes, fashion accessories, cosmetics and homeware, is to accept bitcoin via European cryptocurrency company Paymium.

Gonzague Grandval, co-founder and CEO of Paymium, labelled the move as a "major event for e-commerce in Europe".

Showroomprive.com, which is based in Paris and was founded in 2006, registered a €350m turnover in 2013.

Having raised $46.9m in funding in 2010, the company now employs more than 600 people.

Thierry Petit, Showroomprive.com co-CEO and co-founder, said: "To integrate bitcoin as a new payment option, we had to find a reliable bitcoin payment solution that could also convert bitcoins to local currencies in all the countries where Showroomprive.com operates."

I was in the room when M-Pesa was first launched. As we sat in that conference room in a Nairobi hotel, few of us had any idea that this new baby would eventually grow so fast and so big.

When M-Pesa was first launched that day in late 2006, it was designed as a micro-finance product. It was designed to enable the vast number of Africa's unbanked population - about 80% of them - to access banking services on their mobile devices.

Also read "Is Facebook thinking about accepting bitcoin?" 

Later on, after a few successful runs involving employees and others, Safaricom decided to scale up M-Pesa in 2007. M-Pesa, a mobile money service that has revolutionized money transfer, banking and bill payment in Kenya, is also available in a number of other African countries. It has now also spread its wings to include Afghanistan.

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I've spent my career helping wealth managers from the leading institutions across the globe differentiate themselves in an effort to grow their assets under management.  I've made no secret of my disdain for "your father's wealth manager" and my advocacy for embracing technology to better serve client demands.

Over the past year, it's become clear to me that a new opportunity has arisen to set oneself apart from others in the wealth management industry.  Bitcoin has rapidly emerged as an asset class that can't be ignored, yet today it is little understood by 95 percent of the wealth management community.  Most clients are - at a minimum - curious, while some are eager to find a way to capture the opportunity presenting itself before it passes them by.

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Coinbase has expanded its European presence to an additional five countries following the launch of its services in the region early last month.

The move allows consumers in Denmark, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland to buy and sell up to €500 in bitcoin through Coinbase.

The US-based bitcoin services provider initially rolled out services to Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Malta, Portugal and Slovakia.

Coinbase has also increased the daily buy and sell limits to €2,000 for its users in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Finland.

Coinbase has emerged as a frontrunner in the US market for bitcoin service providers, with more than 1.6 million users subscribing to its wallet service and billion-dollar corporations like Overstock, Expedia and DISH integrating its merchant services.

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Bill Gates has updated his stance on Bitcoin since calling it simply a "technological tour-de-force" months ago. Earlier today, speaking with Bloomberg TV's Erik Schatzker, Bill Gates admitted "the Bitcoin technology is key." Earlier today, Bill Gates gave the final speech at SIBOS 2014, the annual SWIFT banking conference held this year in Boston. The Gates Foundation recently pledged $50 million USD to fight Ebola worldwide

In his speech, Bill Gates shared his vast well of experience with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations' efforts to combat financial inequality around the world. Specifically, he spoke on the promise of digital financial services and how the world's existing financial institutions should leverage them to provide services to the developing world. Always astute, Bloomberg News' Schatzker took the opportunity in an interview to ask Bill Gates whether or not Bitcoin "fits the bill." Though Bill Gates still has marked worries about Bitcoin's use in terrorism and money laundering, it is clear that he now recognizes the promise of blockchain technology.

The need to move money from place to place - the cost to do so: the overhead, as you put it - makes me think, believe it or not, of Bitcoin. Because, some people have said: "Hey, you know? Bitcoin is the answer to those problems!"

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