If this poll manages to aggregate a decent guesstimate for the number of hurt individuals we might get an idea about how long it will take to replace all of them with new people.
Your question is aiming at an irrelevancy. Bitcoin is a success at any price, as long as people use it to pay for goods and services. Bitcoins were not made for speculation. When bitcoin stabilizes, we no longer need many speculators. Speculators are mainly needed as long as there are idiots in the market, because they collect the money from them and put it to better use.
Looking only at the number of idiots misses the point.
No matter how many, the good speculators, those who buy low and sell high and thereby stabilize the price, always win and stay. Bubbles like the current one are like rainstorms, cleaning the sky.
We will have such speculative price bubbles as long as enough idiots come into this market. This is generally not entirely bad for a juvenile, emerging market. It raises the market capitalization, because it brings in fresh money. This enables the efficient speculators to stabilize the market better.
Well you've missed the point entirely... this is a question of consumer confidence. The "Idiots" are funding your retirement...bitcoin isn't getting the majority of its value from its dedicated population of computer geeks (I use that term endearingly). Nobody is worried about the confidence of the bitcoin community here it is what this destabilization has done for consumer confidence in light of the boom that took place with the influx from Cyprus and the press surrounding it. It's going to take a much longer time to replace the money lost because John Q. Public got burned on this one to satisfy the profits of the few.
Don't get me wrong a correction was due but the compounded problem of MtGox not being able to handle their own traffic really shook bitcoin's public image. You'll be feeling the ripples of this for probably months or even the next year as fresh money is much more unlikely to join in now. There will be the same steady influx of miners and mining tech as long as the value stays above 60ish and the difficulty doesn't radically outpace it but we (as a community of investors, miners, etc) just shot ourselves in the foot with massive profit taking (which kicked this off) and a failure to address the forest as a whole vs the trees right in front of us (inadequate bandwidth/protection dedicated to preserving real $ investment).
Lots of valuable lessons have been learned at the expense of John Q.'s pocket book and our own pocket books in many cases. Hopefully we utilize those lessons going forward.