No. The price has been increasing gradually and abruptly for the last 2 or 3 months. As well, over the past 2 days GA says there's been 26,107 unique visitors to my Silk Road page; if 1% actually buys bitcoins (in line with the famous 1% rule of the Internet), that's just 260 people buying bitcoins.

http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u... suggests that daily bitcoin blockchain transactions make up something like $8m; much of this is just people shuffling bitcoins around of course, but even so, 260 people aren't going to push the exchange rate to $29!

The Bitcoin price has been dramatically spiking for the past two weeks. Very curious as to why.

Look at the transaction volume as charted by blockchain.info. You will see a good correlation between that and the price of bitcoins.

A good part of the recent bitcoin transaction volume is due to online gaming startups that use bitcoins, especially to work around US online gambling restrictions.

The bitcoin economy is very rapidly growing from a miniscule base, first in illegal and gray-market trade, and then in international trade where low transaction costs and lack of credit card fraud appeal to global merchants.

Both Mega and reddit have recetly announced acceptance of bitcoins for payment. Not saying that's the reason, but I'm sure it contributes.

Whatever it is, it's made a few people (myself included) rather rich.

Bought a fair few BTC at ~1/6th of the current price, just trying to figure out when to cash it in.