The surging price of Bitcoin has been helped by the start of trading on the Chicago-based Cboe Futures Exchange on Sunday. The world's largest futures exchange, CME, will begin its Bitcoin offering a week later.

Trading on futures exchanges allows investors to buy and sell contracts for the crypto-currency at a certain point in the future at an agreed price.

Tim McCourt, CME's global head of equity index and alternative investment products, said customers are excited but he is not certain how much interest the futures will attract in the first days of trading.

He said he will consider the launch successful if there is a balance of buyers and sellers, and market movements correspond to the underlying Bitcoin price.

"That's the larger measure of success," he said. "What does the market look like - not necessarily how much does it trade."

'Weighing the risks'?

The Futures Industry Association, which includes Wall Street's largest banks, brokers and traders, has written to the US regulator over concerns that the contracts were approved "without properly weighing the risks".

"A more thorough and considered process would have allowed for a robust public discussion among clearing member firms, exchanges and clearing houses," the association said.

Edward Tilly, chief executive of Cboe, said he thinks the criticism is unfair.

He said his firm worked extensively with regulators to figure out how this would work. For example, the firm set up rules in the contracts to address concerns that Bitcoin's value has sometimes varied widely, depending on the exchange.

"This is a walk-before-you-run launch," he said. "It is mindful that this is new to the marketplace."

While Goldman Sachs is a member of the futures industry association, it is also one of the banks that will work as an intermediary to help clear Bitcoin futures contracts for some clients.

A spokeswoman for the investment bank said it was evaluating the risks as part of its due diligence process.

Many big investors have been reluctant to pile into the crypto-currency market unless it is regulated.

However, the prospect of a Bitcoin futures market has raised hopes that it will be regarded as sufficiently "regulated".

While Bitcoin has become more mainstream in recent weeks, many observers warn the market could be a bubble waiting to pop.

Mr Green added: "Bitcoin remains a major gamble as it is very much an asset that remains in uncharted waters... an asset that goes almost vertically up should typically raise alarm bells for investors."

Even a crash or a major correction is unlikely to pose risks to the global economy, some analysts say.

While billions of dollars have been invested in Bitcoin, its $268bn total market value is still small compared to other asset classes.

As more and more people jump on the Docker bandwagon, more and more people are wondering just exactly how we scale this thing. Some will have heard of Docker-Compose, some will have heard of Docker Swarm, and then there’s some folks out there with their Kubernetes and Mesos clusters.

Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator-backed open source Git repository GitLab is currently offline after suffering what appears to be a major backup restoration failure after accidentally deleting production data.

Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator-backed open source Git repository GitLab is currently offline after suffering what appears to be a major backup restoration failure after accidentally deleting production data.