Legality of bitcoin by country or territory

Bulgarian police have seized enough Bitcoins to pay off a fifth of the country's national debt after the value surged by 600% in half a year, according to Daily Mail.

Officers are said to have confiscated hundreds of thousands of units of the virtual currency worth $500million from an organised crime gang in May.

Bitcoin surged past $18,000 after it began trading on its first major global exchange on Dec. 10, the latest in a series of highs that have excited some investors while leaving others nervous of a bubble.

The rate of cryptocurrency bitcoin increased by more than 23%, and for the first time in the history of auctions the threshold of 18 thousand dollars was passed, according to data from the auctions on the electronic exchange Coinmarketcap.

Bitcoin rocketed to a lifetime high well above $16,000 on Thursday after climbing some 67 percent over one week, intensifying the debate about whether the cryptocurrency is in a bubble about to burst.

Bitcoin is a speculative asset and people who invest in it do so at their own risk, the Bank of France Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau warned on Dec. 1 after recent volatile trading.

For an asset often named in tandem with drug trafficking and the dark web just a few years ago, it's hard to imagine that optimism surrounding Bitcoin's potential legitimacy could take the asset to more than $11,000 in value as of Wednesday, writes Time.com

Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has ruled that digital currency Bitcoin is not appropriate according to Islam “at this point.”

For the past three days, the value of the crypto currency bitcoin has risen by more than 20 percent to several points from a record USD 10,000 per unit, Reuters reported. Since the beginning of the year, the value of the currency has risen tenfold, and since the beginning of October has doubled.

The world's most popular cryptocurrency has surpassed $8,200 on Monday, setting another record high. Bitcoin is up almost 850 percent this year.

November has been an extremely volatile month for bitcoin. Earlier this month, the digital currency price fell to $5,500 after developers scrapped the SegWit2X update, leading some miners and investors to shift to offshoot bitcoin cash.

The Iranian government intends to legalize Bitcoin as a legal tender on the territory of the country.