Following up on the comments to George Selgin's post on Bitcoin, here's a suggestion. An enterprising reader should write a paper on the early history of Bitcoin, while people's memories are still fresh. Answer the questions George suggested, and give other details of just how Bitcoin got off the ground. Whether or not Bitcoin becomes bigger than it is, you will have contributed an important piece of knowledge.
Bitcoin history
Peter Surda does this (describing how the earliest price for Bitcoin emerged) to a limited extent in his thesis http://dev.economicsofbitcoin.com/mastersthesis/mastersthesis-surda-2012-11-19b.pdf (from p. 41 (p. 44 of the pdf))
But yeah, it would be a great research project to do this in more detail. Might also work as a wiki.
I hope some of our Bitcoin Forum or Bitcoin Foundation friends take note!
You know what, that's not a bad idea. I have already collected tons of research and was in contact with many of the people, and I also recently decided to do Bitcoin research full time. Maybe after I'm done with the book, I'll do a paper on the history. Let me know if you'd be interested in that. If you're interested in financing my work, there's a donation address on my blog.
There are new alt coins being born every month. You can track in real time how they get off the ground. Here is the newest one, started just a few days ago:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=192243.0
Yes, but the experience of the first user is more significant than the experience of the 100,000th user, and it's the experience of the first user and other very early users in particular that I hope somebody will research and write about.