the main risks to its survival are lack of interest by participants, Much like prior "alternative currencies" like Pogs and Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs and S

the main risks to its survival are lack of interest by participants, Much like prior "alternative currencies" like Pogs and Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs and Second Life real estate? Stepping away from the idealism of "ooh wouldn't it be nice to have a distributed currency", what we have is a bunch of people trying to create a bubble. Unlike many bubbles there's not even an attempt to claim that the asset has some intrinsic value; instead it's just a bunch of people collectively deciding to fool themselves into thinking that a random scarce commodity has value in the hopes that they'll be able to fool more people into it later. Of course, for new bubbles it's all about creating buzz. And how is buzz created? Well, upon getting fooled into paying money for a bunch of bitcoins the rational next move is to start talking up bitcoins to everybody as loudly as possible, to pull more people into the bubble and inflate the value of your own assets. Thus, I predict we'll be hearing more and more about bitcoins over the next year or so as the process accelerates. The bubble almost certainly ends at some point; basically when it runs out of new suckers. I don't hold out much hope for this bubble lasting long enough to bring in significant numbers of mainstream suckers, though, since you pretty much need a degree in mathematics to even understand what the hell a "bitcoin" actually is. In summary, if I'm going to be part of a pyramid scheme I think I'll start it myself instead of getting in at the fifth floor.