That means ~half the amount of people that tried to become verified over the previous 10 days came in the last day. Are you serious??
This seems just outlandish.
Not really -- high price of a commodity, especially a revolutionary one such as Bitcoin (and especially ESPECIALLY once that concept irrevocably sinks into the minds of those that were up to this point still "on the fence"), tends to drive up interest in the commodity. Multiply this by the network effect and the essence of the commodity itself (most important part, IMHO [e-mailable cash]) ... to the moon.
I don't care about the price. The fact of the matter is that something that is far easier to manipulate, and shows far more evidence of being manipulated, is the verification queue. I'm not sure whats going on, but its nuts. I don't care how far up the price is going, 8000 people not only choosing to sign up, but also choosing to verify, their Mt. Gox accounts (indicating they have an interest in using it) in a single day? Thats nuts. I'm sorry. Huge price increase can be explained by "OMG BUBBLE" as well as a simply fast-growing commodity. But 8000 people choosing to sign up in one day is absolute shit. Gmail didn't get that type of sign ups, and that was free & didn't require verification, and was run by a huge company like Google.