For a newcomer price doesn't matter really
You are definitely wrong on this. The first thing that attract people into wanting to know more about
BTC is that its value, its significant price, no doubt about it and it has been some sort of measurement to measure if
BTC is dead or no by some people indeed.
It is not about its chain technology and/or how secure it is but it is because of its value and to be honest most people will not even consider wanting to know about this thing if the price is only a few cents or lower (well it is not the same case with early adopter of course)
Yeah, as a newb all you care is making some money off BTC, but if you go a bit deeper -snip-
Too bad, people wont even go deeper for it because basically what attracts them are a thing that could help them to earn some quick bucks and thats all which makes the "value" became a measurement if
BTC is dead or not. As a proof, you could check the entire forum on the question "how to sign a message from your address" , a simple yet outstanding feature that most people dont know
so one should not really count it as a real ATH, and the crash after it, explained it well, one cannot see a huge raise like that and then a crash that return the price to the original level
Sadly that has been a measurement for most people, whenever the value drop, people are saying it is dead but when the value is going up people are saying that it is bubble because of the "incident" on April 2013