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A tremendous thing happened in the weird world of bitcoin on Thursday. For the first time in the currency's history, the total value of all bitcoins in circulation topped $1 billion.

That's right: A billion bucks, right out of thin air. That's oversimplifying things a bit, but we'll get back to that. (By the way, if you still don't understand how bitcoin works, read this.) For now, let your jaw drop — watch the drool — and start wishing you'd bought a bunch of the cybercurrency way back when the exchange rate was less than $5, because on Thursday it zoomed past $95 per bitcoin. Just to rub that in: if you'd invested $500 in bitcoin about a year ago, which is probably less than one month's rent for you city dwellers, you'd have nearly $10,000 worth of stuff today. That's about a year's worth of rent. Stings doesn't it?

In a way, this is just a microcosm of our financial system as a whole. Haters love to point out how bitcoin just appeared out of thin air on January 3, 2009. It was a pet project of Japanese mathematician Satoshi Nakamoto. Or rather, bitcoin was created by some talented coder slash economist slash enigma using what's probably a made up name. Nakamoto had an axe to grind, too. The basic idea was to create a currency that exists independent of any state government. "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work," he wrote in an essay about government-backed currencies. "The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve."