What I mean to say is: I don't believe that this is the "same" market as before the MtGox hack.
One factor is that with difficulty lower, miners who haven't added mining capacity are now earning fewer BTC per day. For some, the bitcoin income they were receiving was going towards their mining hardware and some was being stocked away. Now with the higher difficulty
combined with a flat or lower BTC/USD, miner's are are selling more of what they produce as before when the exchange rate was clearly on an upward slope. Some are even selling off what they previously had been saving.
Do realize that 7,200 BTC or more are "minted" each day. In the past 24 hours, according to BitcoinWatch.com there were 9,000 BTC (180 blocks @ 50 BTC each) issued so if the price remained level at $17 that means over $150,000 worth of new inflows came into bitcoin or that there was $150,000 worth of hoarding, or some combination of those two.
Then again our google trends are in a lull,
To me, the amount of speculative interest that results from the media coverage is not worth much as that is not sustainable. Instead the metrics that matter most are the number of transactions per day (currently around 11K) and the BItconDays Destroyed metric (currently about 36%).
I'm still trying to see if a pattern exists between changes in BDD versus the market exchange rate. BDD rose quickly (meaning many "old" BTCs move) over the past week but that doesn't say if that was simply coins finding a safe harbor or it was transfers to the exchanges in preparation for selling. Just know there are a lot of coins moving around -- with even a 20% turnover now equating to a "slow day".
The fact that the exchange rate has barely moved makes these movements even that much more curious.
[edited]