So far the retracement is not unusual. Remember that silk road consolidated an entire week or so before finally going into a full breakout.
Also, the difference between now and silk road is we were just in a bear market in the middle of final capitulation, while silk road was during an uptrend. Prices attempted to rally here with a lot of force but were opposed by the large bear market counterforces that existed before the gox crash. This was a rather odd way to end a capitulation and there might be more work to do to buy out all the capitulation coins.
Complete agreement. Bit of an unsatisfactory answer maybe, but "the next few 6h candles will decide how it'll resolve" is the best answer I think that can be given at the moment.
I'm directly comparing the end of the post-April 2013 downtrend (in early July 2013) to the situation now, on the 6h view, and there are a large number of similarities, but also a few differences -- in July 2013 CMF took a *sharp* swing upwards right around that time and didn't come back even as price retraced a bit.
So I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic this marks the end of the post-December consolidation period/downtrend, but it's too early to say with certainty. All it takes is another large enough market sell by a whale, too early into the recovery, and we're back to consolidation time.