I must say the Pride-cometh-before-the-fall here is Epic.
I anticipate that BTC will in the following day or so stabilize at around half its peak value but then follow a gradual decline back into the 30-60 dollar level over a month or two. In other words we will see a broad replication of the July 2011 bubble and crash, simply from a higher base price. Now it's still very likely that BTC will in the long term stabilize at a price higher then what it had just before the bubble started in February, but this means that as in all bubbles people who came in late will have lost.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the alt-coins, will they fall in sync with BTC, or will their value be largely dis-connected from it. LTC logically has potential to be disconnected because of its differing hash, on the other hand it is also closer to BTC in being 'big' (well bigger then the other alts) so it might be effected by broad public perception of crypto-currency.
I'm hopefull that alts can start to emerge out of the shadow of BTC and that their will be a movement away from the mentality that BTC and it's original protocol was some kind of perfect thing handed down by a demi-god. But rather that the future is going to be a succession of one alt supplanting another in a potentially endless succession (or at the least keeping them from stagnating), the same standard we expect with any other piece of software.
It's really to early to say that this is a bubble. I think it can go up or down right now.
People don't don't economic terminology. Crash is 99% of the time misused, and bubble 95% of the time.
Of course its a bubble. You can even mathematically confirm that. That's not the question. Everything that rises is a bubble, meaning it goes over real value, but you need to speculate to make something rise (very short term up to long term), because even when something is fundamental, traders (users) have to speculate about the extent of the effect of the fundamental. The question is... Will the real value meet with the speculative value.
And the answer to that question seems to be yes. Because as much as it rose lately, the usage seems to have completely or more matched.