In 2011, the price for a single BTC hit $35.00 USD. It then shattered and fell all the way to a buck or two. My feeling is that it was due almost entirely to several high profile hacks of bitcoin services (not the protocol or currency itself, just sites that manage your wallet and stuff like that). Hundreds of thousands were stolen. Multiple times in a short period. Kind of puts people off, especially when it takes better than average knowledge to recognize the currency itself is as sound and unlikely to be cracked as ever, and it was only a few web sites with bad management that cost people all their coins.It managed to survive, though. It's been crawling its way back up ever since. 6 months ago they were about $5 a coin. I expect it to continue rising for the foreseeable future. Evidence suggests it's not just a bubble, but actual trust in the currency itself. There are a lot of problems with Bitcoin (the currency as a whole -- capitalized, not lowercase), but it's a really cool idea and somehow it caught on and just won't die no matter what seems to happen.Whether it'll be around in a century or not I can't really say, but I will tell you this: I'm betting on them. Not massively, but hey, every day that you own a bitcoin you make a few cents basically. If that continues, then you've got a profit -- that's better than publicly traded companies (stocks) or foreign currency trading the past few years, right.http://bitcoincharts.com is nice; bitcointalk.org is the real place to go, but it's not as active or informative as I often want it to be.