They won't make a sound no matter how many of them you try to toss in a bucket, and you can't pitch them in a fountain and wish for good luck. But make no mistake, bitcoins are getting big.

The online alternative currency, previously little more than a curiosity in financial markets since its 2009 inception, has zoomed in trading value since the Cyprus banking crisis erupted two weeks ago.

With fears spreading that even insured deposits might not be safe in similar nations hit by banking crises, those looking for a haven to store their wealth have fled to the complicated world of digital cash.

"Incremental demand for bitcoin is coming from the geographic areas most affected by the Cypriot financial crisis—individuals in countries like Greece or Spain, worried that they will be next to feel the threat of deposit taxes," Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx, said in a report on the startling trend.

(Read More: It's Back! Dark Cloud From Europe Stalls US Stock Market Bull Run)

Bitcoins operate on a network that, at least on the surface, resembles a typical exchange on the capital markets. Buyers can exchange their paper currencies for bitcoins and use them wherever they are accepted. Sellers can exchange their bitcoins back for their original currency.

But the value of the currency has been anything but typical.

One of the reasons the crisis in Cyprus has had limited market effects is that something like that would be unlikely to be repeated in the U.S.

That's not to say it could never happen. The truth is, there have been bank runs pretty much as long as there have been banks, so a liquidity crisis certainly could hit American financial institutions and cause substantial damage. But as a matter of scale, the problems in Cyprus are far worse than anything likely to wash up on U.S. shores.

"All things considered, it is extremely unlikely that depositors at U.S. banks would ever suffer losses in the event of a bank failure," said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics. "For a start, U.S. banks are better capitalized and the banking sector is a much smaller part of the overall economy."

(Read More: Cyprus Banks Reopen, Under Tight Controls)

In a report for clients, Ashworth compared the Cyprus situation to the volatile banking sector in the U.S. and concluded that there's little to fear of a repeat performance.

For one, American bank deposits comprise a relatively small 93 percent of gross domestic product, compared to 716 percent for Cyprus.

On top of that, U.S. banks have enough reserves to pay their debts, and the largest institutions recently held up well under Federal Reserve stress tests.

With Congress once again slouching toward immigration reform, it makes sense to look for who is lobbying lawmakers to shape the coming legislation.

As it turns out, while Americans remain divided on immigration, the lobbyists are not.

The Sunlight Foundation, a do-gooder government transparency and accountability outfit formed in 2006, on Monday released "Untangling the Webs of immigration Lobbying," a report examining the organizations that have led the charge for changing the rules on immigration to the United States.

Sunlight dug through 8,000 lobbying reports filed since the last big push for immigration reform in 2007. Six-thousand seven-hundred and twelve of those involved immigration lobbying. More than $1.5 billion was spent on this immense lobbying push.

The report lists which business sectors were the most active lobbyists. The chart here lists the sector, the total of immigration related bills lobbied upon, and the top two issues. Click here for more explanation of the chart from Sunlight.

The banks of Cyprus are scheduled to open Thursday -- a goal post that's moved several times since the island nation's odyssey began.

But, honestly, if you were a Cypriot banker who was going to deliver the news to your wealthiest clients that their bank accounts were a lot lighter than they once were, would you go to work? What if some of those clients may or may not have made that money in some rougher lines of work?

I'm reminded of that scene in Martin Scorsese's "Casino," when banker Charlie Clark meets with Nicky Santoro, played by Joe Pesci, to talk about how his investments are going. The scene is tense from the very moment Nicky declines the offer of a cocktail.

"I've been trying to reach you. You're tougher to get than the President," Nicky complains.

Twice in eight days Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem has made unguarded comments that moved markets. And he's only been on the job since taking over from Jean-Claude "Mr Euro" Juncker as head of the Eurogroup in late January.

The immediate banking crisis in Cyprus looks very close to reaching resolution but, as Felix Salmon notes, this isn't the end of Cyprus's troubles or the geopolitical contest over Cyprus's future.

Felix writes:

In the Europe vs Russia poker game, the Europeans have played the most aggressive move they can, essentially forcing Russian depositors to contribute maximally to the bailout against their will. If this is how the game ends, it's an unambiguous loss for Russia, and a win for the EU….

Of course, the game does not end here. It's unlikely that Russia will appear bearing a better deal at some point in the next 24 hours, but the hit to Cyprus's GDP is going to be so enormous that staying in the euro over the long term, absent another round or two of massive debt relief, is going to be extremely difficult.

This deserves more attention. In the first place, the Europeans may be playing poker but the Russians are not. The Russians are playing something closer to preferans, which was very nearly the Russian national card game in the 19th century and is still quite popular there. Preferans resembles bridge, in which players make bids or contracts for how many tricks they will take. The other players then try to win tricks away from the top bidder, hoping to make him come up short on his contract.

What appears to be the final resolution of the crisis in Cyprus may not be perfect but it does not stray that far from the approach advocated here and on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page last week.

But a good resolution of the Cyprus crisis may not be enough to undo the damage from interventions that are not based on clearly stated diagnoses or predictable frameworks for government actions.

The Wall Street Journal's look into SAC Capital's trading is somewhat shallower than its length suggests. This isn't the fault of the Journal reporters, who clearly did a lot of work digging through public filings to unearth unusual trading patterns and well-timed trades. Yet it's hard to tell exactly what it is that SAC does to consistently beat the market, because not much is revealed about how it trades.

SAC's quarterly disclosures are not quite useless—but nearly so. They only provide a snapshot of the fund's positions at a small moment in time, which isn't very useful when SAC is said to make rapid and frequent forays into asset markets. What's more, these filings don't say anything at all about short positions — which no doubt make up a sizable piece of SAC's portfolio.

However, there is something that can be teased out of what the Journal reports, something that might help explain SAC's returns.

The real shame about the mess in Cyprus is that it's all so unnecessary.

All the complicated proposals aimed at restoring the solvency of Cyprus' insolvent banks, all the confusing false flag plans, all the Great Game geopolitics surrounding the natural gas resources, the threat to the unity of the European Union, and the unsettling of the Cypriot people.

It's all unnecessary. There's a much better, and simpler, alternative that has been available right from the start.

Let the failing banks fail.

What if Congress raided up to 10 percent of your bank account to bail out the government?

That's exactly what could have happened in Cyprus if its parliament had gone ahead with a proposal to tax depositors for a 5.8 billion euro bailout–the first of its kind in the ever-escalating euro zone debt saga.

"This is an extraordinary and extreme step," Adam Schneider, chief adviser at Deloitte Center for Financial Services, told CNBC.com. "If you're a company that needs cash, you sell assets, but you don't seize employees' cars in the parking lot."

"Now that this idea has been floated, it's reasonable to ask whether other countries with significant debt would consider this step," he added.

The United States, unlike its European counterparts, is the issuer of the currency in which its debt is denominated. This means that the U.S. cannot be involuntarily forced to default on debts or abandon its currency, unlike European nations that borrow in a currency controlled by the European Central Bank.

Still, that doesn't stop many from worrying that the U.S. debt burden is already too large.