Why did the value of 1 BTC fall from ~1100 USD in December to ~450 now? I can understand volatility for a couple 100 dollars even, but the value has almost halved. Is this due to the Mt. Gox hacking?
Bitcoin being young and all on a journey of sell discovery is going through bubble phases due to increased global interest and investment and will continue to behave this way as long as interest and investment continues to flow it's way
However when it reaches a certain threshold, where adoption has reached a far and wide audience growth will slow and bubbles will be less frequest or non existant. We're still pretty early, pretty risky too since failure is also a high probability.