Well last week 
the phrase "buy Bitcoin with credit card" was  trending on Google. These are tempting gambles  that pensionless people (a.k.a. millennials) run the risk of spending all their savings before they die. But are they ones you should take?


Thinking back to the first time you heard about Bitcoin is probably painful, and not just because it might bring up memories of the white dude you went to college with who knew what was good with the dark web. The fact about this so-called cryptocurrency is that you'd be rich as hell right now had you actually listened to that loathsome (and unlikely) financial adviser. In the past year alone, the price of Bitcoin multiplied by double digits; last week, prices soared from $11,000 to $17,000. To put that in real terms, remember that guy who made news for buying two pizzas with Bitcoin back in 2010?  he'd be well over $100 million richer today.
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first of all, why has the price of Bitcoin exploded so much in the past year, particularly in the past few weeks?

From my perspective,  Bitcoin's original selling point was that it was going to be this kind of easy payment application where you can pay anyone anywhere in the world directly without having to deal with a middle man. And as the price has gone up, and as the network has gotten clogged with too many transactions, that payment application doesn't really seem to be working anymore. So people have changed their way of talking about it to describe it as a crypto-asset. And people are buying it because they think it's going to have higher value in the future. So it's just a cycle of people thinking they're gonna buy it now, and someone else is going to  buy it later from them for more. That sounds like a speculative bubble, but there is a core contingent of people who believe that as some point Bitcoin will be used for everything—they call it "hyperbitcoinization."

 it sounds like people are treating Bitcoin like a collectable comic book more than a currency.
Absolutely. It's interesting if anyone is actually spending it instead of trading it. Like, "I'm going to cash in on some of my gains by selling it to someone who's going to get in now." Using it to pay for anything doesn't make any sense if you believe it's going to go up in price.
I'm skeptical that it is different. Another feature of a bubble is the failure of people to understand what they're investing in at all. People are making money, so they just want to jump in. They don't know the history of Bitcoin. They don't understand the scalability issues. They don't understand the mining centralization issues. 
Talking about Volatility, sure. Hacks on them, too. It's a purely software-based asset, so it sounds very basic, but having bugs in the software [is a concern].

 I'm hoping we'll hear more from them. However, you can warn people about systemic risks, but you can't necessarily make people change their behaviors. Especially if each individual thinks that they're the one who's gonna make the money here, and who cares about everyone else.