And per Peter R's chart, user adoption is what drives the market cap, not investor adoption.
Peter R's chart doesn't show that because: 1. it doesn't show causality, and 2. there is no way to know whether the transactions and/or addresses in use on the Bitcoin network are users or investors. A huge amount of Bitcoin activity is investors, probably a majority. Really, who "uses" Bitcoin? Who used it last November-December when his chart showed both the metrics and price skyrocketing? A better interpretation of his chart is that investors drive market cap!
I use bitcoin all the time. even during the boom i used bitcoin. i've even done a few in person transactions will zealous hillbillies. Perhaps you are projecting abit..
Do you really think that is, in the aggregate, highly significant relative to the amount of speculative activity? I don't. At the height of Silk Road it is possible there were a lot of non-speculative transactions. Outside of that time period I doubt it. Admittedly I don't have any hard data either way.
I wholly reject a 10x increase in non-speculative activity over a relatively short time though. That simply didn't happen.
EDIT: Let me expand on this thought a bit. If the Peter R chart showed an important link between non-speculative use (what the Farewell Post Princess called "users" as opposed to "investors") then the relationship should have broken down during the 10x runups. It didn't. The chart simply shows that activity is correlated with price, but there is no basis there for disqualifying speculative activity as being critical to the correlation. Quite the contrary.