I agree with #3 above.
With #4, I think it's best to not frame bitcoin's price rising relative to last year's ATH, which was potentially generated out of the beginnings of the ultimate Goxxing - I think it just needs to slowly rise in a less volatile fashion.
Hopefully more volume brings this, but maybe it won't.
I have heard many people say volatile rises are bad, but this simply is not true.
Every new technology in the past has seen exponential growth, and every new technology in the future will see exponential growth. That's just the way thugs work.
First, only the developers know about it, they use it and test it and share it with a handful of people to test it some more before releasing it to the public. Than friends and family start to join in. Than friends and family of friends and family start to join in. At most a couple of 100 people use it now. Than some specialized forums and blogs etc talk about it. Nothing mainstream yet. Slowly it starts to grow, but not very rapidly yet. At some point it gets the attention of mainstream media and thousands of people read about it and start getting interested, but most of them forget about it at first.
Than after a while of steady growth, before you know it it reaches critical mass and suddenly it seems to grow very rapidly. Think about Facebook and Twitter for example. At some point these websites gained like a million new users per day. Bitcoin is at the stage were pretty much everyone in the world has at least heard about it sometime. But most people do not know much about it yet. The next bubble will most likely get the attention of those people who know about bitcoin but have not really paid attention to the technology. Once bitcoin becomes 'really expensive' (relatively of course) $5000 or so. People will become interested and will want to join in on the profit. They will likely buy in during the following peak.
After about a year or two we can expect a period of time where we will, like Facebook, see a million of new users a day. Think about what will happen to the price if a million people will buy some bitcoin, even if it's a small amount, each day. On top of the investors we already have.
Keep in mind too that when we reached that point, there will not be many bitcoins to go around anymore, as only complete retards will sell all their bitcoins. So most people will only be able to buy a fraction of a bitcoin, and they are likely to buy at least $100 or even $1000 worth of bitcoin. Which would amount to $1,000,000 a day of fresh fiat. Bitcoin will most likely be in 6 figures by then.