Hey, remember the Beef O'Brady's St. Petersburg Bowl? If you're not a diehard college-football fan, you might not have, even though the game has been a post-season staple for years. (Last year, East Carolina trounced Ohio. Go Pirates!)

This year, the game has a bizarre new sponsor, thanks to some bargaining between digital-currency payments processor BitPay and ESPN's live-action subsidiary ESPN Events, and will be known as the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl for the next three years, through the 2016 throwdown. The first Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl is scheduled for Friday, December 26, 2014 at the Trop.

Bitcoin is the emerging online currency being touted by tech prophets and people who use their already monstrous personal wealth to create even more of it as the future of money. However, while several well-known (mostly online) brands and services — such as Overstock, WordPress, Tigerdirect, OKCupid, Expedia, Etsy and about a million gambling sites — have begun accepting it, Bitcoin's movement into the mainstream consciousness has been less than instantaneous. (Let's put it this way: during a phone conversation a couple of weeks ago, my father asked me for the first time what it was.)

To this writer's knowledge, Bay area residents cannot as yet use bitcoin to pay for beer, nachos or cab fare. (They will, of course, be able to purchase game tickets and merchandise with it.)

"College football fans and the bitcoin community represent a similar target demographic — tech-savvy men between the ages of 18 and 40," says BitPay executive chairman Tony Gallippi, sounding like he may have only ever seen a bowl game on a 90-inch TV from the vantage of his hot tub that's also, somehow, a massage treadmill.

This year's game will also mark the beginning of the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl's affiliation with a new conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).

This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2014.