[Nursie]

The price is heavily manipulated and volatile, most of the volume appears to be fake, and the only major 'use' anyone is making of it is speculation.

Also it hasn't gone up consistently, it's still at around 50% of its peak almost two years ago.

[snitko]

Look at 10 years chart. It's been going up consistently.

[SI_Rob]

Well, sure, but then the 4 year chart of returns on my high school summer lawn moving business went up 13,500%, from $5 net my first week, to $675 on my last. Behold my 15 year old financial genius. /s

Any asset that doesn't crash back to a penny likewise goes up astronomically from the day trackable value is first created. Bitcoin's chart appears to have outperformed the market so dramatically, percentage-wise, because its chart tracks price from effectively zero (depending on how you would price a 1/10000th slice of pizza) or a dozen or so pennies (if you're starting from the first BTC-E numbers). But this is really not any different from what happens to shares in a private company, which also start at effectively zero as well.

Publicly-traded share values aren't visible to the public until they have already risen a hundredfold or more from their inception (in terms of percentage gains). Sure, Bitcoin was visible to "the public" but only if you happened to be in the right place at the right time and knew the right people - which in practice are opportune circumstances no different than those available to people who happen to be close to the founders of a privately owned company.

[Nursie]

Sigh.

No, it hasn't, unless you've got some sort of alternative definition of "consistently".