The article here:
http://www.coindesk.com/analysis-around-70-bitcoins-dormant-least-six-months/indicates that the actual velocity of bitcoin is very small, and that a large part of bitcoin is not participating in any liquidity on the scale of less than 6 months. Moreover, 4-fold merchant adoption hasn't given any rise in liquidity.
Now, to me that is somewhat alarming for the near future of bitcoin, in the following sense: the "market cap" we are talking about is in reality much smaller, as it only applies to the liquid coins. The actual market cap of bitcoin is hence rather something of 500 million or 1 billion rather than the announced 5 billion, and most of that is even speculative. That means that the effective inflation rate of bitcoin is huge: the 10% mining is on the total amount, but reduced to the 30% or so that are liquid, we have a currency with a 40% inflation rate until the end of 2016, and most of that is not even for merchant purposes.
This is hard to keep up, in my opinion. If the whole of the coins were to become liquid for the same market cap (that is, if the velocity of bitcoin would start to look as the velocity of most money), then the price can only go down by something like a factor of 3. That will of course not happen unless some panic breaks out. But I have a hard time imagining with such a small actual velocity (and hence the potential of much higher velocity), and such a high effective inflation rate (40% on the liquid amount of coins), how the price could go up seriously in a few months.
Moreover, a price increase may "unfreeze" a lot of the frozen coins to cut losses or to take a benefit that is not going to happen any time soon.
Merchant adoption doesn't seem to be a strong carrier of value at the moment.
So I don't see honestly how we can have high sustained prices of bitcoin in the near future with such data.
I can be wrong, of course, this is just my impression from what I see. But I would think that even maintaining current prices are already a kind of small miracle given the situation.
That doesn't say anything about the long term, when stronger adoption can set in, but as of now, such an analysis looks to me as unescapable. I would be happy to be proven wrong.
