I agree, and I like it that way. It shows Bitcoin is reaching maturity as a currency, and no longer speculative
Doubtful in the extreme.
This current state is the result of 18 months of bearish battering. The people who have stuck around are possibly struggling to believe it might actually go up for once. Everyone else has gone off to nurse their broken dreams.
Once a rise is properly confirmed the cycle will slowly slot into gear again. There'll be new waves of speculation ready to be tickled up and down by our bearish friends when it goes tits up again.
Rinse and repeat until the mid 2020s perhaps or for all eternity.
I really don't think so. I see it from the perspective of the mining of coins which ultimately determines its value. It correlates with the difficulty level that it is at now. If you study the graphs it's concave, between end 2013-2014 that's where the spike happens (due to interests, development of better miners, etc) and now it's reached a plateau. That would be the real value of the btc, whether speculated or not, because that's what Bitcoin was created for: a currency that is based on maths, applied onto the real world, where most currencies are controlled by the government.