By all rights, Iceland -- a remote Arctic island inhabited by just 320,000 people -- should be a forgotten backwater. And for most of its history, it was. But in recent decades, the former Danish colony has begun to attract outsized attention from abroad. After its banks were fully privatized in 2003, foreign money poured into the financial sector, which grew to almost ten times the size of national GDP before bursting in a matter of days in October 2008.

The euro crisis has put most people off currency unions. But not in Africa, it seems. In November the leaders of five countries of the East African Community (EAC) agreed to form a monetary union within ten years. A month before West African politicians agreed on a plan to introduce a new shared currency, the eco, over the next few years. It should eventually subsume West Africa’s existing currency bloc—but not its central African cousin.

The pair of Bitcoin hearings held this week by Senate committees could have been a disaster for the Bitcoin community. After all, Bitcoin first came to mainstream attention in 2011 when Gawker reported on Silk Road, an anonymous online marketplace that allowed users to purchase a wide variety of illegal drugs with Bitcoin. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) denounced the site and suggested that Bitcoin was "an online form of money laundering."