Bitcoin may be following this classic bubble stages chart.
forbes.com
forbes.com
Seriously though, Bitcoin is going to enjoy its glorious rise for only as long as the politicians/regulators/law enforcement fail to realize the true extent of the threat to their power, IF Bitcoin's intended properties are allowed to continue unrestricted. Once all these players wake up, the crackdown will be a lot fiercer than anything ever done against P2P file-sharers. Napster threatened just one industry, Bitcoin is taking a swing at our entire political and economic system.
It is just a matter of time before every Bitcoin exchange is forced to turn in all their records to IRS, the transaction histories are fully outed and the main benefits of using Bitcoin are minimized. The regulators have no reason to leave alternative currencies alone vs. crack down like they've done to the likes of the Liberty Dollar ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar )
At the end of the day, any currency is only as viable as the enforcement power behind it, which ultimately means "people with guns". Bitcoin has none of it and US Dollar has the largest world power behind it...
The tendency is to say that it either incorporates a lot and becomes very valuable and the de-facto international store of value and currency (as well as representing a number of assets such as stock or estate property) or it goes to zero.
It's volatility is certainly decreasing as times goes by and the big picture is certainly positive as things stand although I agree that it would take a simple coordinated move to ban it in the western world to take it down.
Yet this has not happened yet and I can't stop but wonder why given what it has happened to Liberty Reserve and we have seen coordinated moves for far less (Kim Domcom with Mega for instance).
It would be enough for it to be regulated such that tax or vat needs to be added and bitcoin would immediately be heavily affected.
Furthermore we do not know who created bitcoin and their real motive.
In my view it is much better than the current central bank situation but it seems there is a side of it that means it has no one accountable.
Should mining ever get compromised (if it is not already) it is not really clear to me that we would even notice.