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The price of bitcoin took a slight tumble Thursday and Friday after the federal government announced it will auction off nearly 30,000 bitcoins later this month.

The US Marshals Service issued a call for bidders interested in buying some of the bitcoins obtained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the October bust of the online marketplace known as the Silk Road, which investigators say served as a clearinghouse for illegal goods.

The USMS plans to auction 29,657 bitcoins, valued at $17.4 million by the CoinDesk bitcoin price index, in blocks of 3,000 bitcoins on June 27. The auction will not include the roughly 144,000 bitcoins seized from the computers of the alleged-Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht.

The value of a single bitcoin varies according to demand, much in the same way that stock prices rise and fall. Since the cryptocurrency鈥檚 launch in 2008, the bitcoin price has fluctuated dramatically as users' faith has been repeatedly dashed and restored, frequently in conjunction with news events relating to bitcoin.

In December, a single bitcoin fetched nearly $1,200, a peak. That high didn鈥檛 last long, however. Within a month, the price plummeted nearly 40 percent after China鈥檚 central bank refused to recognize the digital currency. The currency recovered moderately in the weeks that followed, only to take a series of dives between January and April, especially after the Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange MtGox announced in late February that it had lost track of customer bitcoins valued at more than $400 million and was filing for bankruptcy.

In the past two months, bitcoin has been making a quiet comeback. Its value hit a three-month high of $665 on June 3. Thursday鈥檚 US auction announcement prompted yet another slide, to $565. The value recovered slightly Friday but continued to waver throughout the morning.

Skeptics have long suggested that the听tenuous value of the bitcoin will make it difficult for the currency to gain much support in the financial community.

鈥淚t鈥檚 not surprising to see these sorts of fluctuations,鈥� Ethan Mollick, a听business and finance professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, told the Monitor in November. 鈥淭here鈥檚 nothing backing it. It鈥檚 just sort of a commodity based on hope and it鈥檚 going to be very volatile.

Bitcoin advocates counter that such dramatic fluctuations are the necessary growing pains of a new form of currency.

鈥淏itcoin right now looks like the Internet did in 1991鈥� 鈥� a lofty promise, but hard for the public to grasp, Meyer 鈥淢icky鈥� Malka, founder of Ribbit Capital and member of the Bitcoin Foundation, told Monitor Global Outlook last fall. 鈥淚t took the Web browser to build a visual layer of what the Internet would be. I think that bitcoin is going through that same process right now.鈥�