Bitcoin, in case you haven’t heard, is the New Big Thing. It’s been advancing throughout the news media this past year, only to explode into the headlines in the last few weeks of November.

Bitcoin is either the currency of the future or the next big bubble, depending on who you talk to (and usually, how old they are). It is a virtual currency, beyond the control of central banks—or any banks—but can be used to buy real things.

And it’s not just used for online trading. Traditional brick-and-mortar shops are starting to accept them. Tesla will sell you a car with bitcoin. The University of Nicosia in Cyprus will sell you an education. The first bitcoin atms are even under construction.

Six months ago, a list of businesses accepting bitcoin contained only 200 entries. Now it’s close to a thousand.

To the converted, bitcoin is doing for currency what the Internet did for information. Transactions are instant. Fees are minimal. Borders are nonexistent. It’s hard—but not impossible—to trace the transactions. You don’t need a credit card, or even a bank account. It is, insist some, the money of tomorrow.

But the skeptics also make a pretty compelling case.

At the start of this year, one bitcoin was worth $13.56. A month later, it was $21.30. By the start of March it had hit $33.51. In early April it peaked at nearly $240, before plummeting down to $83. Currently it trades at $880. That’s up from about $725 on Sunday, and down from it’s all-time peak of $1,200 on November 30.

So how much is a bitcoin really worth? $14? $1,000? Nothing?

That’s the million-bitcoin question. Of itself, a bitcoin has no value. It’s not backed by anything. Neither is the dollar, but at least it has the government to lend it legitimacy.

A bitcoin is worth whatever other people are willing to swap for a bitcoin—hence its extreme volatility.

And what is a bitcoin? How does it work? The explanation is sufficiently complicated to bore most of our readers. Its workings revolve around solving one simple question. If you create a digital currency—where each coin is basically a set of numbers—how do you stop someone spending the same coin twice? If I hand over a coin in exchange for a potato, for example, I’m giving something up. If all I have to do is say a number, I could turn around and give someone the same number in exchange for something else.

Bitcoin’s answer is to broadcast every transaction to the world—but in such a way that it’s very hard to tell who the buyer or seller are. And the system ensures that the records of which bitcoins went where is very hard to forge. That way, all bitcoin users can view the records and verify that no individual spends the same coin twice.

But do most bitcoin users even know that much about the currency they’re using? Probably not—especially not all the new users that have jumped on after the hype in the media.

Who invented bitcoin? No one knows. The original paper outlining how it works was published under what is believed to be pseudonym.

So the next big thing is a currency that most of its users don’t understand, created by someone whose identity is unknown, has no intrinsic value and a price that rockets up and down from day to day. This is the next big currency? Even with the advantages mentioned earlier, why would anyone even use it?

One answer: to break the law. Bitcoin is the currency of choice for buying drugs, hit men or anything else online. But that answer doesn’t hold water anymore. The U.S. government shut down the Internet’s biggest illegal online marketplace in October—seizing 0.22 percent of all bitcoin in circulation in the process. Since then the online illegal drugs market has been in turmoil. Yet at the time of the government’s raid, one bitcoin was worth about $140. It took a slight hit as a result of the raid, before soaring in value. Bitcoin may be used to break the law, but there’s no evidence that that is its main purpose—or even a significant one.

Again, then, why use bitcoin?

One major factor has to be the desire to get rich quickly. People hear stories about guys who bought a handful of bitcoin shortly after they came out in 2009 and were worth almost nothing. Those early investors got rich and now there’s a huge pull to jump on the bandwagon in hopes of getting rich too.

But here’s another factor—and it’s definitely a major one: People don’t trust the dollar. They don’t trust the U.S. Treasury. They don’t trust the federal reserve to maintain the value of the dollar. They don’t trust the U.S. government not to spy on them. They don’t trust the nsa to keep its nose out of their credit records. They fear that someday the American government will impose limits on what people can do with their money—how much they can take out of the country at one time, for example.

It’s no coincidence that the university accepting bitcoin is in Cyprus—where the government recently confiscated savings to pay for a bailout. With bitcoin, that’s impossible.

Many of those using bitcoin want a currency that the government can’t mess with.

The dollar is backed only by people’s trust in America and its government. And that trust is so low that some people would rather trust a relatively unknown currency created by an unknown guy with an unknown value.

Several weeks ago, we wrote about how although the world deeply mistrusts the dollar, it uses it because there are no alternatives. The popularity of bitcoin shows that this unhappiness with the dollar applies not just to nations, but to individuals too.

Bitcoin, no matter how successful, won’t threaten the supremacy of the dollar—it’s too much of a niche product for that. But the Trumpet has said for years that in order to fix the eurocrisis, Europe will have to come up with a reliable and improved currency—supported by a common eurozone government. It could do that by fixing the euro. The EU could launch a new currency—perhaps backed by gold.

The whole world is crying out for such a currency. Even risk-averse savers who wouldn’t touch a bitcoin with a digital barge pole would flock to anything solid and reliable—a currency that a government won’t inflate away with money printing or quantitative easing.

Watch for the emergence of this new currency. When it arrives, the dollar is dead.