Technomage, what kind of "fundamental decline" happened from June to November, then? And what has suddenly changed since the 2 dollar low in November?
Mainly three things have changed.
1) The core 3rd party services have improved and we have not seen the kind of issues we saw from June to November, such as the MyBitcoin incident and the Mt. Gox hack etc. Nothing of this magnitude has happened which has increased the overall confidence in Bitcoin.
2) Bitcoin has proven over the last few months that it's not a fluke. It's not going anywhere. The longer Bitcoin stays alive and well the better its momentum long term will be. It can't easily be dismissed as nothing anymore and in a year or two nobody can say that anymore (if it continues to stay alive and well for a few more years).
3) This is something more tangible which is the actual usage of Bitcoin, based on the transaction count. Unlike the node count, which is entirely irrelevant due to the ever increasing usage of light clients and web wallets, transaction count actually matters. That graph is looking healthy to me, especially when taking into account that the price of $2 was clearly a major overshoot.
http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactionshttp://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?showDataPoints=false×pan=&daysAverageString=7&scale=0I admit it's not looking like we're going to the moon just now, but I'm not claiming anything like that. I'm simply saying that things are not as bad as some want to believe.
