There are several factors driving the bitcoin prices up, including people from European countries converting their money to bitcoin because it makes it harder to seize.

But since the beginning of the year bitcoin has doubled nearly 3 times, and this past month has seen additional acceleration. Bitcoin has been in the news a but I don't see any legitamate reason for the dramatic spikes of the past few weeks... except for speculaiton.

I posted this because I think that today's extraordinary spike is preceeding a crash of the market. At some point, all of the serious speculators will have put all their money into the coin, and they will be looking to cash out. A huge spike like this would seem like an optimal time to cash out.

And if there aren't enough people to buy the coins, the market will plummet.

Bitcoin has been succesful recently because the value has continued to go up. When the price takes a hit, people will lost confidence, and non-speculators will also start to sell. I don't know how hard the initial hit will be, but the last time that Bitcoin started losing value, it spent almost 3 months declining.

I believe that the same thing will happen again, and bitcoin will (after the initial hit) decline for several months before starting to make its deflationary recovery.