[dragontamer]

Because you're not looking at the important metric.

The _price_ of BTC is completely irrelevant to its "success". The only people who care about BTC price are speculators who are simply "day-trading" with the newest penny-stock.

The real measurement is whether or not people are actually using BTC as a mechanism to transfer wealth between each other.

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

Notice: the number of BTC Transactions have remained steady for months.

When BTC transactions reach an all-time high (and when those BTC transactions are more than just temporary "flash crash" exchange volume), then I'll start calling it a success.

[mrb]

Your exact same graph (zoomed out to show all-time data) shows that we are at an all-time high (the moving 6-month average clearly is):

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&s...

[sangfroid]

You have to keep in mind that during the course of those six months, Silk Road was taken offline. SR was assumed to be driving most of the non-exchange transaction volume. The fact that its dissolution had no impact on this metric is quite surprising and I'd argue it's an indication that "legitimate" trade activity has actually increased over the last few months.

[dragontamer]

https://blockchain.info/charts/trade-volume

Trade volume has skyrocketed. IE: people are trading more BTC for USD than ever. It wasn't since the Crash of April since we've seen trade volume this high.

[atmosx]

And you know that people are actually doing transactions how? As far as I can tell a big whale is keeping the volume of transactions steady moving coins from one portfoglio to another. There you go, transactions steady.

[gweinberg]

Yes. What I'd really like to know is, how many bitcoins are being exchanged for actual goods and services, not just shifted from wallet to wallet or swapped back and forth for dollars.

[XorNot]

Well, all those hacked BitCoins have to be moved around as well.