I'd like to see a marked increase in the daily number of transactions to confirm a new bull phase. According to the Metcalfe model (using TXs per day), the value is still approximately $400.
This graphs tucks the last 8 months in a tiny corner, with the previous 4.5 years taking almost all the space. If that tiny corner were magnified, the match would not be as impressive, I am afraid.The "TX per day" parameter does not follow the price since late May, and both it and the "new addresses per day" deviate a lot from price from December to February. I don't know how these discrepancies could be explained, but they cast doubt on the model.
As I noted before, transactions and addresses are still free, therefore those blockchain statistics could be mainly due to "fake" transactions -- coins moving between address belonging to the same person. Note that the daily number of transactions has been nearly constant since February, and the estimated BTC volume is quite constant since January -- with no echo of the huge fluctuations in price in that interval. I take these facts as evidebce that only a small part of those transactions represents transfer of bitcoins between different owners. Note also that a single user could generate all the present volume (100,000 BTC/day) by moving 700 BTC divided among 400 addresses of his own to 400 new addresses, every 10 minutes or so.
