That now seems like a distant memory. 

Since reaching a low of $109 on the Mt. Gox exchange the day of Silk Road incident Oct. 2, prices have climbed nearly $100, reaching as much as $233. Prices haven't fallen below $200 since Sunday.

The reason is simple: China.

Even before the Silk Road crackdown, Chinese had been nudging the market up.

In September, in a story headlined "Bitcoin Mania Grips China," BloombergBusinesseweek's Lulu Yilun Chen reported on the surging investment in Chinese-based Bitcoin exchanges and "miners," or firms that set up computers with the processing power to unlock new packets of currency.