Here's my thinking on how this will play out. There's a finite number of people in the world. Each of them hears about Bitcoin for the first time exactly once.

Here's my thinking on how this will play out. There's a finite number of people in the world. Each of them hears about Bitcoin for the first time exactly once. At this point one of two things can happen -- either they say "What? That sounds stupid" or they say "Well, that sounds pretty stupid, but there's a chance it might take off, so I might as well be an early adopter and acquire a bunch of 'em". People in Group A can be safely ignored for now. People in Group B serve to drive up the price of Bitcoins, since they say "Shit, if I spend a few tens of dollars now then I could be a zillionaire in the future!" The Group B people also now become Bitcoin evangelists, assiduously spamming and astroturfing all over the damn place in an effort to convert more people to the Bitcoin fold. The trouble is, eventually you run out of new people. People who made the initial decision to join Group A are very unlikely to have second thoughts and jump on the speculative bandwagon six months later, since they'll later on say "Well shit, I'm not gonna pay a hundred bucks for what I could have got for five bucks a few months ago". And of course the penetration of the Bitcoin meme outside tech geek circles is likely to be incredibly low, since most people won't even understand what the hell it's supposed to be about, let alone how to use it. Anyway, like every speculative bubble in history it'll burst when you run out of bigger suckers. This will probably happen fairly soon due to the the limited size of the target market, but not before everybody gets sick and tired of hearing about it. End result: a lot of wasted CPU cycles and a reasonably small transfer of wealth from the gullible to the canny. Life goes on.