As new people in e.g. emerging countries wake up, it'll surge and then fall back to a higher floor. India or Brazil next maybe? India's another billion people with a cultural attachment to gold / distrust of fiat. It's all speculation right now, but there are different levels of speculation. In the short-run traders are riding it up, selling and buying again after corrections to increase their holdings. But there's also longer term speculation on the future potential of Bitcoin as a fast, bureaucracy-free, un-blockable electronic payment system; and store of value.

There are crazy ideas out there using the anonymity, e.g. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-market-creator-whos-crowdfunding-murder-with-bitcoins

Chicken-and-egg situation, with volatility slowing adoption for commerce, which in turn magnifies the volatility. It behaves like a leveraged ETF that swings wildly on news. But payment platforms could mitigate the volatility e.g. by using futures (& other derivatives) transparently in the background as they develop to hedge against the volatility for both customers and businesses. If you believe in it, the best thing you can do is ask every business you patronize if they plan on accepting Bitcoin. Tell them you'd like to use it in future. Enough people do this and they will accept it.

Satoshi's core innovation: the blockchain's distributed consensus-based trust exchange and record-keeping machinery... is pure genius.

One thought I have (which won't be very popular round here) is that we could be looking at the "Altavista of cryptocoin" in Bitcoin. The "Google of cryptocoin" may come later.