The only stat that matters is transaction volume. Oddly that is not listed on blockexplorer.com or bitcoincharts.org.
My "transaction volume", I mean the number of transactions. The way bitcoin works, every spend of a newly minted coin looks like 50BTC (even if it is 1BTC, 49BTC change).
Transaction volume is a worthless metric. People send money to themselves all the time so it doesn't reflect real trading.
If there isn't an obvious reason for people to start sending themselves in an increasing (or decreasing) trend while keeping other transactions constant,
trends of transaction volume and transaction count are important indicators. Don't look at the numbers, look at the graph. I guess we could kindly ask molecular to do it for us for a donation.
