Just last year at about this time, venture capitalist Chris Dixon predicted in Wired that the price of bitcoin could "easily" go as high as $100,000. Those were heady times!

Bitcoin was trading at about $800 when the story was published, but "Chris Dixon believes that's still a serious bargain," Wired reported.

Today bitcoin trades at about $270. So much for the bargain! Hope you didn't rush out and buy at $800 because of some story you read in Wired citing a guy who happened to be investing in a lot of bitcoin companies.

Then again, Dixon still could be right, someday. His point was that whatever you paid for a single bitcoin these days, it was super cheap compared to what it might be if bitcoin becomes the primary way to pay for things on the Internet.

Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which has made investments in bitcoin-related companies, such as Coinbase.

To be sure, there is a big difference between bitcoin the currency and bitcoin the technology. That's good, because bitcoin the currency has suffered a few setbacks lately — nothing too big, just like the biggest bitcoin exchange going out of business and police suspecting that all the bitcoins were stolen by the people running the exchange.

Oh, and some rich VCs who spent millions buying up loads of bitcoin, like Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, lost their shirts on those "investments," as Andy Kessler pointed out recently.

Never say die: Draper's firm led the latest round of investment in Coinbase.