The long term trend for bitcoin value is contraction, not expansion.

Here's the fact of the matter:

+ Bitcoin just enjoyed more media exposure over the past 3 months than can reasonably be expected to occur anywhere in the near future. There's just nothing newsworthy forthcoming unless there is something scandalous that happens again, and we're just about out of interesting scandals. We've made the rounds from illegal purchasing to hacking to market failures.
  There's just nothing left to get the attention of corporate media. The fact is that no-one cares about bitcoin as a medium of exchange, except a small core constituency of idealists here on these forums. It HAD newsworthy spectacle value as prices skyrocketed and people "got rich quick," but those times are over.  There is nothing left of newsworthy value.

+ The price run-up happened SOLELY on hype alone. There's not much analysis that needs to be done here. It was clearly a bubble that started with the Silk Road coverage, inflated with the mining crazy, and ended with the Gox scandal. That's it folks. Bitcoin jumped the shark 3 weeks ago.

+ The current "stability" is no such thing. There is no stability when there's no backing economy.  The only "stability" we're seeing is roughly the same sub 10-15,000 (could be exceedingly lower, and possibly a bit higher though doubtfully) "investors" propping up the price and using trading bots to maintain the appearance of a functioning market and "stability."
  The fact is that the market has been on a slow and steady DECLINE ever since Gox came back online. This is because there is no new blood entering the market, just the same old speculators throwing more of their paychecks into it; BUT, not enough to grow the market. That's why were seeing a steady loss of a few cents of USD value everyday. And this will continue for the long haul.

+ Echoing the same dilemma of 3 months ago when bitcoin began catching on with speculators, "Where is the bitcoin economy."  Well folks, this is it. The list of bitcoin merchants hasn't grown at all, and in fact if you browse the Trade section of bitcoin.org itself, and explore some of the merchants there you'll find that some of them have removed their bitcoin advertisements and no longer APPEAR to accept it. I encourage you to peruse them and see for yourself, because during that excercise you'll also see that basically all businesses listed are extremely small time, mom and pop shop operations, and most of them quite amateur at that.  That is your bitcoin economy. That is what you have to work with now, and for any reasonable foreseeable future.

This is not a thread about the speculation of bitcoin's future, these are the facts.