These TA threads are all full of infinite growth prediction forecasts, then doomsday predictions if that trend line is broken. While Bitcoin is something you can compare to the growth of the internet as a disruptive technology with exponential gains, the main difference is, Bitcoin has competitors (fiat, gold, equities, etc), and the internet itself doesn't. 99% of these forecasts don't take this into account.
You can't do TA of Bitcoin in a vacuum without taking into account any of it's competitors, that's completely worthless. Any prediction you find accurate will be the result of another fool using the same method to form a coalition of fools. Some people just go on with the assumption that Bitcoin will outpace gold, stocks are peaked, and that everyone wants to dump fiat because it sucks to do their charts, but to paraphrase people like Peter Schiff, "I don't like fiat but I still need it to pay taxes to not go to prison".
It's perfectly normal in a competitive market for one player to go up and down by large swings, completely reverse course the next year depending on quality of services and value they provide compared to their competitors, then go parabolic again without going extinct on the dip. This is how Bitcoin will always be, it is not the internet, it relies on external market variables.
This is not to say that Bitcoin as an investment is bad, it has a pyramid scheme attribute built into the system called "halving" to pretty much guarantee you returns as long as the system doesn't implode, it just requires you to take a long position. You also have to look at fiat, gold, and equities, then you might be able to infer some broad assumptions about future price trends, especially if all the competition was tanking since the wealth has to go somewhere. As an example, when Bitcoin was really on the upswing a while back, the state of fiat was grim (as always), gold was tanking at the same time, and stocks were said to be overvalued by 50% (yes, and the willy bot conspiracy).
Situations like this are beneficial for BTC price, but if negatives occur in the BTC market, such as China news, then it's a zero sum negativity game, and the money doesn't enter and just stays where it is. Having gone over all these aspects of Bitcoin in the big picture, you also have to take into account the software is still beta. An announcement of highly effective, scalable pruning could take the price up 20-50% overnight alone. There aren't many technological innovations such as this going on in the gold or fiat market.
And yes, things like that are still progressing in the background while Gavin hangs out on his private island with pet albino parrot:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=643758.0
