In response to altoidmintz points:
1) Your utterly wrong, the 'market cap' had even less to do with 'GDP' then it dose with the current valuation of a coin. The amount of BTC commerce is hardly any different from what it was a few months ago when the coins were valued at a fraction of what they are now. Note that I do not consider BTC<->Fiat exchange as part of BTC GDP, no GDP statistic on earth has ever included foreign currency exchange. The BTC GDP is simply the sum of final goods and services in the currency. In real economies Forign exchange volume is generally much larger then the real GDP and BTC may be even more heavily weighted towards exchange.
2) Thx
3) Explain why, your skepticism is not an argument.
4) Never said this hype bubble was the last and the time frame for the decline in exactly like that of 2011 bubble, so far my predictions on the general shape of the BTC markets movement have been flawless as I'm on record predicting a stabilization at ~120 USD. In the following 3-6 months we will see a decline down to ~30 USD level. Some scary news may trigger some wild swings in that period that will seem to be the cause of the drop, but they will not be the root cause.
5) Hardly an insight when supply from mining is completely known from now until the end of time.
6) $16,500 is simply the hourly mining rate times the current valuation, its the BTC portion of the pie graph. Their are not enough new suckers buying BTC to support that kind of flow of funds. Currently miners are not selling all their coins because they have good margins on their mining, but that will eventually come to an end and all coins will need to be liquidated every day to pay for mining overhead.
7) XRP the ripple currency is effectively another thing that people who want to get into 'coins' could buy instead of BTC so it can potentially pull off some of the flow of funds necessary to keep BTC prices up. Ripple will likely take a year or more to get significant enough to start doing that so I do not believe it will have any effect on BTC in the time frame in which I expect BTC to settle down to ~30 USD and it's effect is not involved in that prediction.
We can see BTC hype volume by Google trends. The graph clearly shows the 2013 bubble was 3 times 'louder' then the 2011 bubble.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=1%2F2010%2041m&cmpt=qWe can see the effectiveness of the hype by looking at downloads on Sourceforge, here is the identical time frame.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/timeline?dates=2010-01-01+to+2013-05-15The graphs are strikingly similar, but note that while the hype was 3 times higher in 2013 compared to 2011, the download rate was less then twice as high. This is a strong indicator that each subsequent bubble is becoming less efficient at bringing in new users (almost exactly half as effective as 2011 by my math). This is naturally the result of exhausting the supply of potential new adopters, their are only so many crypto-anarchist-austrians out their on the internet who are interested in BTC as a concept. So I have little faith in the notion that BTC is going to continue to grow indefinitely, and particularly not by this bubble-n-crash process.