If you look at
www.bitcoinity.org/markets , you get a good picture of the market depth, it shows right now that it takes approximately 20000 bitcoins to reach 9,80 BTC/USD. That is amazingly just under 3 days of mining (bitcoins created/inflation is right now at 7200 bitcoins/day).
For me that comparison is staggering, that is a very small number of buyers in the economy/currency of bitcoin compared to three different aspects. The first is already mentioned, inflation. The other two are total number of bitcoins in the economy today, around 7 million, and how that number will change in 1-2 years, to around 10 million.
All this tells me that the bid side should be at least 5 times bigger on the bid side to show real interest in the Bitcoin economy at this levels (around 12 dollars). I know that I just use the information from Mt.Gox, but they have such a large part of the trade right now that it doesn't change the picture.
Any thoughts? How did the bid side look like when bitcoins cost only a couple of dollars?