The Economist’s Graphic Detail blog touches on the bitcoin boom (which we covered yesterday and last Friday), and it sees something distinctively bubbly about the whole thing:
Online interest in the currency has spiked in recent months. Though an increasing number of legitimate businesses are adopting the currency—one Finnish software developer has offered to pay its employees in Bitcoin—it still has relatively few users. Its primary commercial use is probably to buy drugs from Silk Road, a sort of pirate eBay hidden in the “deep web”. This suggests that the new users are buying Bitcoin as an investment, not as a means of exchange. For any currency to thrive it needs users, not just speculators.
The whole thing comes to a head in one killer chart, but you’ll have to click through for that.
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