The recent price increase.

Bitcoin has been on pretty much a tear in October.   We're up about 40% since October 1st.

 I believe this to be due to a number of reasons

1) Increased adoption by retailers, eGifters walmart gift card, point of sale integrations, etc

2) China's "Baidu" has begun to accept bitcoin as a payment method.
     -Alot of the current rally has been led by China, they have been breaking volume records on their exchange..

3) The shutdown of the silk road got a 'stain' off bitcoins track record, and paraded it through the media for two weeks.   I had no less than 10 people ask me about bitcoin because of this story.   Media attention is good for bitcoin price, leading to more media attention.

4) The US governments dysfunction.    If you think the government will continue to be dysfunctional, invest in bitcoin, because bitcoiners dont give a rats ass what the government does.   We've "opted out" of the system, and chosen not to participate.   The more dysfunctional they are, the higher the price of bitcoin.

5) The nomination of Jannet Yellen as federal reserve chairman.   She will probably be responsible for more money printing than anybody in history.   This drives inflation, and drives people to secure assets (gold, silver, bitcoin).    Again, bitcoiners have "opted out" of the system so we dont care.

6) The continued dysfunction of ALL governments world wide.    Argentina LOVES bitcoin.

7) The Chinese government had a press release saying "we need to de-Americanize the world, and we need to use a "super sovereign" currency.link. read it seriously   How would one develop a "super sovereign" currency.   A currency that cannot be manipulated?   Sovereign meaning "self governing, independent"
    -Bitcoin is essentially an un-manipulatable database.   There is no way to change a block once its written.   Could it be used as a database to track world trade?     Once this current 'trust based' world trade system breaks, i'm pretty sure we'll move to something that is a 'trustless' system.   That means that because I cannot trust one person(or group of persons) I will design a system that trusts nobody.

I see the recent run up in price as more of a 'correction'.   This software has the ability to change the entire world, yet we get a 2 billion dollar market cap.   Facebook has a 90 billion dollar market cap with 700 million people posting lolcats on their pages.  Bitcoin will defund world governments and will stop endless war.
   A string of good news for bitcoin, and bad news for world governments has led this rally.   I do however think this is just getting started.   Once the price breaks 267, it will be a new high.    It will get run through the media, fuelling it to further highs.  I would bet somebody lunch that we will be at $500 by the end of the year, which BTW will only be a 6 billion dollar market cap.  This idea is just too big to be valued so small.

The first bitcoin bubble the price went from $2 -> $32, followed by a crash.   Bubble caused by media attention for the silkroad. This was a 16x return.

The second bitcoin bubble went from $32-$266, followed by a crash..   Bubble caused by Cryprus event.  This was an 8x return.

The third bitcoin bubble will have price going from $135 --> ???? followed by a crash.   Caused by the events described above. Perhaps we get a 4x return on this bubble, with a peak price of $540??