Its actually driven by like the stock market. Volume available/unavailable. Also its now has a commodity market place. Penny stocks could be profitable many penny stocks you can flip 300% profit. Penny stocks way more volatile then Bitcoin. Bitcoin in the last year has not gone below the point it was exactly a year ago. If you have any idea what your doing you will not lose money unless it goes belly up (way to much adoptions and commodities available).
Also Germany has already made it legal tender. USA has already created the FinCen regulation. Which is a good first step. Also if certain governments do ban it. Others will open the door. It will be a forbidden fruit that will drive the price through the roof. The foundation and adoption is too far along to stop its growth. The only thing that could stop it now is a quantum computer in the public that breaks encryption.
Baudi now offers some of their services for bitcoins which is China or Japans equivalent to Google.
I'm glad you admit what can you buy with gold...The only difference is now I can buy almost anything with Bitcoin on the web. Where gold is a physical product, bitcoin is not. For instance Big Commerce is integrating Bitcoin with there shopping cart. Big Commerce powers over 40,000 ecommerce sites. Soon we will be to where 50,000-100,000 shops will take the Dollar, Credit Cards, Paypal and Bitcoin. You can't say that about precious metals etc.