A little summarize about the development during past year:
First, increased usage will reduce the daily coin supply on market thus raise its value,
An easy way to make bitcoin worth millions of dollarsHowever, the effect is not as large as long term hodling: If you constantly spend 10 coins every month, then only 10 coins will disappear from exchange, but if you hold 10 coins, they will also disappear from exchanges, for a long time
With more established exchanges, the usage as remittance medium just become more user friendly. Now I'm doing all my international transactions using bitcoin, if the receiver is in a country that have good bitcoin exchange. It is much cheaper and faster than traditional way
There are still limited spaces to spend bitcoin, but that means majority of merchant still have to learn how to use bitcoin by themselves, instead of relying on payment processor like bitpay. And that require a thorough understanding of bitcoin security, it will take some time. It is not recommended to rely on any third party to take care of your bitcoin, while majority of people are not geeks, this is still the major obstacle towards mass adoption
Mining difficulty does not drop, this indicated that the demand is still strong. If the demand drops, the mining difficulty will drop, because majority of the demand is fulfilled by mining (lowest possible cost to get coin)
So far, we have not seen hyperinflation following the huge scale of fiat money printing. Just like stock market bubble, as long as fiat money hold its value, big institutions would still ride the wave for a while. But those institutions are fully aware of the overvalued situation of fiat money, now it is a fiat money bubble, they will get rid of their fiat money positions as soon as they see the sign of a crash, we just don't know how and when it will happen