The Chinese government is cracking down on Bitcoin. Credit:Bloomberg You know nothing about how to start a small business, but you do understand the internet and you've worked out that something is making your friends rich, very quickly. Suddenly Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies like it are worth $US160 billion. A decade ago they didn't exist. The newly wealthy aren't mum and dad investors, but their children, 20 and 30-year-olds huddled over laptops late into the night in Japan, the US and Australia. Company announcements aren't made to shareholders and boards, they are published on internet chat forums such as Reddit and Slack. Sales are made through digital wallets that allow for instantaneous, anonymous, irreversible transactions from seller to buyer that are recorded in a secure ledger called a blockchain.

An employee demonstrates using a smartphone to purchase bitcoin from an ATM at the Coin Trader retail store in Tokyo. Credit:Tomohiro Ohsumi Traders can invest in new currencies and companies offering services such as digital payments in physical shops through "initial coin offerings", much like the initial public offerings on the stockmarket but worth as little as a fraction of a cent at launch. Most of the trades are done in Bitcoin, which, much like gold, is valued for its finiteness. It's algorithm says there will only ever be 21 million of them. A technician inspects bitcoin mining machines at a facility operated by Bitmain Technologies in Inner Mongolia, China. Credit:Qilai Shen It was created in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

"The originating community had a strong libertarian and anti-establishment spin that, in many ways, was similar to the free-software culture, with its strong anti commercial values," argues Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Joichi Ito. The tulip bubble craze that gripped Holland in the 1630s saw the price of the flower rise to the equivalent of more than $35,000 today. Credit:Jodie Richter In September, JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said any employee trading Bitcoin would be fired for their stupidity. Now, the backbone of the entire global operation is 30 times more volatile than the US dollar. It has surged by 500 per cent in the past year to $5380 a coin on Friday. The anti-establishment currency has got the establishment taking notice.

JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon has called Bitcoin "worse than tulip bulbs". Credit:Bloomberg If Bitcoin was a stock it would now be more valuable than Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the same firms that are currently grappling with how to get their heads around a market that regularly records swings of 20 per cent a day. In September, JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said any employee trading Bitcoin would be fired for their stupidity. He called them "worse than tulip bulbs" in a reference to the tulip bubble that gripped Holland in the 1630s that saw the price of the flower rise to more than $35,000 as competing merchants enhanced prestige through price. The bubble burst, the government had to intervene and the Dutch economy took years to recover, according to a 1997 paper in the Financial Analysts Journal.

More than 360 years later, a similar thing happened, though this time it wasn't tulips, it was the internet. Thousands of "next big things" ran on the steam of the first widely accessible internet browser in the 1990s and pushed the world's second-largest stock exchange, the NASDAQ, up to $US6.71 trillion. Three years of the dotcom boom was fuelled by young, aspirational investors riding the potential of the internet. And pop it went. Are we here again? The cryptocurrency market shamelessly trades on speculation and potential. There are no laws governing formal announcements, just tweets promising a yet-to-be launched partnership with Visa that is always a week away.

Traders make their fortune buying up millions of coins, inflating them in what appears to be a coordinated internet chat room frenzy, then selling at the peak of the cycle. "Wtf? Where do people get the memo for a massive pump and dump? 900%, 700% 300% in the past 24 hours," one trader wrote last week. The Brazilian Central Bank has described the phenomenon as a pyramid scheme, while regulators in China and Russia, two of its biggest markets, have moved to shut down exchanges. But each time it bounces back. A 40 per cent Bitcoin plummet after Chinese authorities swooped over regulation concerns rebounded within days, fuelling suggestions the digital currency world had become more and more resilient to government intervention. In Australia, a bipartisan push from Liberal and Labor MPs in August called for the Reserve Bank to lead the government into the fray, not away from it, by launching Australia's own digital tender. In Europe, the Bank of England is undertaking a research programme into issuing a digital currency, with Canada and Sweden moving in the same direction.

Vulnerable, volatile, with a yet to be fully realised real-world potential, it has all the hallmarks of a tulip, but one that could have its market sown by becoming legitimised through the very world it resented. Ross Gittins is on leave.