I don't think it matters. Per blockchain.info, the volume of Bitcoin transactions is in gradual decline over the last year and seems stuck at about $50m USD/day, despite many more merchants offering to accept payment. Market cap is fairly steep decline and hash rate has been leveling off.

https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-... https://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

It just struck me that the market cap trend seems to have gone down in very similar fashion tot he price of oil over the last 6 months. If enough people who bought bitcoin did so primarily as a hedge, then you'd expect it to loosely track a basket of popular commodities like oil and gold (the price of which looks quite similar to Bitcoin's market cap over the last year IMHO - http://goldprice.org/). Can't wait for Google to get their automatic statistician tool online - I don't like statistics well enough to want to use R regularly but I would love a tool that I can use to quickly measure the coupling between different datasets.