Definitely HN fodder today.
Completely false. The curve mirrors the speculative run-up from $0.50 to $30 pretty closely... the LAST time bitcoin's market scaled an order of magnitude.
It's happened before. It will happen again.
Though, now, it's a $1B+ valuation and in the New York Times.
Maybe, but my own unscientific, vague sense is that I've been seeing multiple bitcoin related submissions to HN every day for quite some time now. At this stage all of the arguments have been hashed and rehashed (ho ho) in the comment threads to the extent that they're getting pretty repetitive and tedious (especially since so many of them are so political).
So, sure, it was marginally interesting a few days ago that bitcoin was up a significant amount so we had multiple articles about that, and then it was up the next day too so we had some articles, and then there were opinion pieces about why it was a bad idea / good idea, none of which really said anything much new, then there were columns about how it was becoming mainstream (which was obvious if you'd been following all the bitcoin startups that also get posted to HN), then today we find it's down an unusual amount. Surely you can see how this is becoming a little grating even for someone who started out with an interest in the topic.
Furthemore, the trade volume in Bitcoin is unexceptional.
Edit, 10:56PM CET: It went down to ~$100, and it is already back up to $180. I predict another drop in the next few hours, then a recovery around at least 200. That's the usual pattern.
It looked pretty much like the end of the system to a lot of people.
Whoever bought at 250 and was looking all day at the graph to see how to scalp some dough, got exactly what he deserved.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
Also, it seems to be down below 70 now, so another 50% drop since yesterday, depending on what time you're talking about.