Oh, and of course that there are no popular actually used (ie, by lots of people with lots of volume) economic applications I know of besides SatoshiDice and Silk Road. There is still no Bitcoin economy.
this is not true... bitcoin is finding its niches in many small places, just planting seeds -- no flowers yet, but soon
i can also tell you from first hand experience that seals with clubs (bitcoin poker) saw a massive influx of new users over the course of the last 6 months.
i think you're underestimating the amount of media coverage we received... bitcoin was all over reddit, tumblr, etc, in a big way. these kinds of things have a gradual effect.
in other words, i think the bitcoin userbase is expanding at an unprecendented rate, even still, though said figure may have taken a hit after the crash.
Yes.
A couple other points...
Firstly, I'm not so sure the correlation between the recent spike in media coverage, and Google Trends, is as easy to parse as
Maged has indicated. I've come to think that media saturation is
reinforcement to the immediate cohort of fresh bitcoin users - and given that belief, I'd expect a certain amount of decoupling between that and Trends. The people who are - right now - interested in bitcoin, have already done their Googling. They are the third wave of bitcoiners, after the early crypto/anarcho geeks, followed by the idealist and speculator bunch (odd that those two should show up at about the same time...).
The fourth wave won't be along until it's considerably easier to buy, sell and spend. Still difficult, by grandma's standards - but easier than today.
Also, I somewhat disagree with
Blitz about miners. I don't think difficulty will be going down any time soon at all. I also don't think miners are selling as much as he thinks - or that they will. Miners are gamblers - they're betting on the come. I mined at two and three-dollar bitcoin for a long time; at a theoretical loss. Didn't sell any. We'll see how many coins are sold by miners, I guess - but I don't think many...