Here are some thoughts that I have on the intrinsic value of coins.
OK, so we went from $2 to $7 in pretty short order. One thing that did not change over threefold in that time is the utility value of the coins.
Bitcoins are useful for several reasons - silkroad, alternative to wiring money, etc.. But the use case hasn't changed drastically. Certainly not three or four fold. Sure, there's organic growth as people realize there's new things that Bitcoin lets them do, but I don't think that's multiplied in the last two weeks.
If we were getting swarmed by people looking to make gambling deposits, or suddenly the word got out that Bitcoin is a great way to buy cigarettes for half price by cutting out the tax man and (again) we were swarmed by people looking to do this, then I would say yeah, new money is pouring in and there should be a reason it's going up. If a publication that is read by thousands of hawala brokers or MSB's suddenly ran a serious article on Bitcoin as a way to move money, that would be something that would drive such instant growth. But nothing like that has happened in the last two weeks.
In the last two weeks, CES and CBS made us look a lot more legitimate to the world. That's big. But I think it's a leap to think that suddenly it will make people think "I need to jump in and buy these now because someone is soon going to want to buy them from me."
And sure, maybe some gazillionaire will look and say $6 coins - how cheap - I'm going to make these go from $6 to $100 myself. But that gazillionaire will probably be sophisticated enough to do research and discover that this market price is being set by about 1% of the bitcoins in circulation, and the other 99% remain to pop the price at any time and make a sucker out of him... one need only look at
http://ecdsa.org/stats.html to see how many non-moving coins are out there lurking. I for one am not recommending anyone buy any $7 coins unless they are someone who plans on clearing out all the asks on the order book multiple times, or know someone is about to.
