Unfortunately, once one looks behind the curtain of the system, one conclusion seems inevitable: it was deliberately designed as a pyramid scheme to enrich early adopters, not as a currency to trade goods and services. This Quora discussion explains it at some length, but basically, because a) the total currency supply is limited, b) it gets harder and harder to mine bitcoins over time, there’s now a small elite of bitcoin owners. The wealthiest own hundreds of thousands of bitcoins. Nobody will match them in wealth at this point without a prohibitive investment of money and time, and the gap between rich and poor will continue to widen indefinitely as a new bitcoin owner must spend dollars to purchase mere fractions of a coin (or contribute to its growing ecological footprint by becoming a “miner” who wastes computing cycles on the generation of coins).
http://intelligentdesigns.net/blog/?p=108 - blog of Erik Moeller of Wikimedia (personal blog, not official).
I would not, personally, attribute malice to the founders and say that it was deliberately a pyramid scheme. Though functionally being one may not be good.
In a pyramid scheme, the early adopters are immediately given wealth as the new adopters adopt it. In bitcoin, this wealth is notional unless the early adopters sell their bitcoins.
The idea is that the early adopters shepherded the system by holding and mining bitcoin when it was very risky to do so. How risky is it now? With more merchants and more knowledge in the wealth preservation community, it is a smaller risk and its price is reflecting the same.
Bitcoin's present status is similar to that of an asset bubble, and as Mencius Moldbug said, Money is the only bubble that does not pop.
If bitcoin pops, it pops, if it doesn't, then well, anyone who sold at an earlier stage will end up feeling regret.
There seems to be quite a bit of a Bitcoin interest around here, with several articles about it already: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7]
I propose that links and generic Bitcoin comments should be posted here, instead of making a new discussion thread for each interesting article about the subject.