"In sum, what's going on with Bitcoin seems to me like a perfectly "normal" phenomenon. Intersect a convenience yield and speculative demand with a temporarily limited supply, plus temporarily limited supply of substitutes, and limits on short-selling, and you get a price surge. It helps if there is a lot of asymmetric information or opinion to spur trading, and given the shady source of bitcoin demand -- no annual reports on how much the Russian mafia wants to move offshore next week -- that's plausible too.
"This view says that price surges only happen with restricted supply, and accompany price volatility, large trading volume, and short holding periods. That's a nice testable link, which seems to hold for bitcoin. And other theories, such as madness of crowds, no not explain that correlation.
"Bitcoin is not a very good money. It is a pure fiat money (no backing), whose value comes from limited supply plus these demands. As such it has the huge price fluctuations we see. It's an electronic version of gold, and the price variation should be a warning to economists who long for a return to gold. My bet is that stable-value cryptocurrencies, offering one dollar per currency unit and low transactions costs, will prosper in the role of money. At least until there is a big inflation or sovereign debt crisis and a stable-value cryptocurrency not linked to government debt emerges.
"(This view is set out in more detain in a paper I wrote about the tech stock era, Stocks as Money in William C. Hunter, George G. Kaufman and Michael Pomerleano, Eds., Asset Price Bubbles Cambridge: MIT Press 2003. Alas not available online, but the link to my last manuscript works.)"
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