"Consensus" for Bitcoin means the people behind enough mining pools to control > 50% of the hash rate. What end users want is irrelevant.

It's people like you who keep Bitcoin going! Bitcoin is zero sum - for every winner, there has to be a loser. We need all the suckers we can get! Keep trading!

The first peak in 2011 is when Bitcoin got initial attention.
The second peak in mid-2013 is the China bubble.
The third and biggest peak in 2014 is the Mt. Gox collapse.

The first two were when the two big Bitcoin runups happened.  The Mt. Gox collapse, no so much.

Post Mt. Gox, the hype level has been modest, and the price has been flat or declining.

What we're seeing looks like a thinly traded pink sheet stock followed by momentum investors. When the price happens to go up, buyers pile on and run the price up for a short period. The same thing happens in the other direction. Neither effect lasts very long. That's sort of the last 6-8 months of Bitcoin, since the China bubble popped.

Right. At $375, this is a non-problem. 

If someone cracked the hash algorithm, or found a cheaper way to compute it, they'd make a lot of money, difficulty would go to the moon, but the rate of Bitcoin creation would not increase. Just like when ASICs came in.

This looks like momentum traders.  Nothing has happened to affect the price much in the last two weeks, other than the head of Silk Road 2 being arrested. It may even be 'bots doing momentum trading driving the rally and selloff all by themselves.

Momentum traders have the effect of amplifying any little change and increasing volatility. They don't affect the long term price much one way or the other.

It's possible to make a lot of money momentum trading.  Especially if you have some edge like access to the transaction flow at an exchange, and can front-run. Mt. Gox, before they tanked, seemed to have a lot of that.

Compare  volume in US dollars, which is flat.

There are more transactions, but the transaction size is dropping. This suggests 'bots busily making little trades.

Because that's "manufacturing and exporting".  That's a permitted way to get value out of China. It's not in yuan yet, so exchange controls don't apply. I suspect some of those Bitcoin mining farms are even getting industrial development loans.

A year ago, we had the start of the China-driven bubble. China has exchange controls; it's hard to get money out of China.
For a few months, Bitcoins were a safe, easy, legal, online way for people in China to get money out of yuan and into dollars and euros.

Then the People's Bank of China cracked down on Bitcoins. The bubble popped. It took a while to run down, and now it's over.

This is a year too late. When "Bitcoin was going to the moon", maybe it mattered. Now, not so much.

The Winkelvoss EFT is a dump. They bought a lot of Bitcoins, enough that if they sold them on any Bitcoin exchange, they'd crash the price. Now they want out.  The EFT is a way for them to sell their Bitcoins, hopefully without crashing the market.

It's probably too late for that. They need a big supply of dumb money to exit this way.

The number of transactions is up, but the total amount of the transactions is not.

I like the part where they say they can no longer rely on Bitcoin appreciation to fund the foundation. That's realistic.

Well, of course. That's how multiple exchanges work. If there's any significant price difference between exchanges, somebody will buy on one and sell on another, and the prices will equalize. The prices will close up to the cost of the transaction, which is a few percent on Bitcoin exchanges.

This is arbitrage.

If you see a significant difference between exchanges, that's a bad sign. It means there's trouble getting funds out of some exchange. Remember when Mt. Gox was far higher than anyone else?  That was because most investors couldn't get funds out of Mt. Gox.

With the steadily declining price of Bitcoins, this is now a non-problem.

Well, the basic design, where the early adopters got tons of Bitcoins very easily, suggests it was designed as a money-making opportunity.

That's the Bank of England's large payment system, £277bn a day, average transaction £2m.

Now check the dollar volume of Bitcoin transactions. Around $50 million a day, and flat for six months.

Transactions in Bitcoins are going up because it takes more Bitcoins to buy the same stuff.

Not quite. The difference is that China has exchange controls. Converting yuan to dollars or euros is hard. That's what drove the Bitcoin bubble in China - it was a way to convert yuan to Bitcoins to dollars.

Japan has no exchange controls. Any major bank will convert yen to dollars or euros.  Today's rate is 112.30 yen/dollar.

Well, face it, since the China bubble collapsed and Mt. Gox went bust, Bitcoin has gone sideways for six months. Transaction volume in USD is flat, and the price has gone down slowly. Difficulty went to the moon as the ASIC guys ramped up, but that's leveling off now, too.