It has been said that the economy is more like an organism than a machine. I agree with this. An organism grows and adapts to its environment but does not do well in restricted environments. It is impossible to calculate what a few billion people will do next year. Each has free will and can complicate the picture.

Just to clarify, for me the value of bitcoins is at least what I have to pay to get them. This may not be true for someone else who does not really want to use them and is only trading for investment purposes. I am trading to get enough value to actually use the system as intended as an anonymous payment method. Most items I would want to buy, like digital gold, are expensive and I need a lot of money transferred to bitcoins to do it.

Just in case this is helpful to anyone else who is in my same position I would like to share what the current value is to me.

As of right now, the difficulty to generate has gone up 4x since my last entry where I listed the value at $0.018.
Therefore I am willing to pay $0.072 and have been doing just that on the exchange.
Apparently there are lots of other people who feel the same way because the ask price is now up to $0.084.

Edit:
I saw some new information on electricity consumption that looks quite a bit more accurate than what I had:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=403.msg3574;topicseen#msg3574
I may need to revise my figures.