The ability to trade bitcoin futures on the Chicago Board Options Exchange may have given some degree of confidence about its legitimacy to skeptical investors, but there’s another, more basic element that’s driving the surge in popularity of the cryptocurrency, writes Seema Shah, a global investment analyst with Principal Global Investors. Although that confidence is an important step for an asset whose value increases as it becomes more widely accepted as a store of wealth and a means of payment, it may signal something darker about the overall economic outlook, according to Shah. Read what she has to say about bitcoin and the meaning behind its wild price swings in the Principal Blog here.