Here's some healthy price perspective for you...
Approximate time BTC price has been between:
0-$1000: 8 years
$1000-2000: 5 months
$2000-3000: 11 weeks
$3000-4000: 26 days (or only 16 days leading up to Sept 1 ATH, pre-"China FUD")
$4000-5000: 37 days
Talk about an exponential time series... Personally, I think Bitcoin owes $3xxx at least another month or two before waving goodbye forever.
Edit: quoting my post below:
Doubling times might be another way to look at it...
Approximate time to "permanently" double:
from $5 to last time it ever dipped below $10: 7 months
$10 to $25: 4 months
$25 to $50: 2 months
$50 to $100: 6 months
$100 to $250: 2 years (!)
$250 to $500: 10 months
$500 to $1000: 8 months
$1000 to $2500: 4 months
$2500 to $5000: (not yet: 2 months and counting...)
Edit: quoting my plot below:
The last 10
floor to floor Bitcoin doublings since Nov 2012, now in more precise graphical form on a log-linear plot using Bitstamp pricing. I arbitrarily chose base 5 because it fits this plot well. Base 2 would have the same number of doublings.
Average doubling time: 6 months
Shortest doubling time: 1 month ($20 to $40)
Longest doubling time: 18 months ($80 to $160)
The Mt Gox bubble is clearly disruptive to trend. Since recovery, doubling times have only accelerated. This kind of hyperbolic growth is typical of a technological singularity. Think color tv, mobile phones, or the Internet.
At this scale, it's really hard to see the recent hardfork and China FUD having much of an impact at all.