Does anyone know why blockchain.info is down?

Thanks!
I wish you were wrong...
Within the big picture as described above, do you believe is still possible to have another future hype (fueled maybe by the interested actors and human psychology) or rather a continuous series of crashes/resistance?

Please keep up the good work!

ummmm... how high?

Welcome.
How do you think anyone can compete in long-run mining with a country where electricity is already very cheap and may be obtained even cheaper? (like 2-3-5x or more times cheaper...)
If our cost is 220$ (give or take), what would be their cost then?
I'd bet mining farms in China grow like mushrooms after a rain. On the other hand, I also suspect that ASIC companies keep the hefty profits under control, mostly for themselves and maybe for a small group of investors. That's why global hash-rate is relatively stable.

Edited that for you.

So, what do you think betstamp's customer will most probably do once the biz resumes?
Carrying on with their trading as before
Move onto another exchange
Pull out from trading in btc
Pull out from trading in fiat

I know what I will do but I'm curious. Maybe a pool would be useful?
Thanks

Maybe it's true, I really don't know.
But still (as I probably didn't get it well; it must be one of those language barrier issue): wouldn't be better instead to take good care of his both eyes?! 

Many thanks for your comprehensive answer!
It seems, as I've found in the last couple of hours, the use faulty PSRNG's might pose a threat, maybe significant enough to drive the price further down.
The unfolding story is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=107172.msg8939173#msg8939173 I hope you'll find it interesting enough to consider including it in your great work (I'm closely following your posts) that you're doing on studying/documenting the whole ecosystem.
Anyway, because I was invited so kindly by a smart a** to basically gtfo, I will stop here. I better go&check how do I create a more secure wallet and move my coins there. I look forward to meet you again soon and also let's hope my hunch is unjustified.
Oh, I'm a miner for more than a year now. So, I'm noob but, sadly enough, I see many old members here who seems to know a lot less than me.
Best regards.

Well, I'm stuck here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/22/is-it-possible-to-brute-force-bitcoin-address-creation-in-order-to-steal-money
The math posted there is ok for me but I'm not familiar with crypto so those parts are over my head for now, Anyway, as one can see, there is no consensus among experts. Interesting enough, it seems that one post there clearly reads "It is possible to brute force some Bitcoin addresses, because some people generate their private keys in an insecure manner." and further the author even gives some practical cases! Please have a look at it. Most answers says it's totally impractical if not entirely impossible while few seems to point that it is doable, in principle, but it would require a lot of hashing power (my concern exactly: where is all the missing hashing power going?!) and instead of attempting an attack  it would be more convenient to mine directly (yeah, but now the reward is halved so things significantly changed). So... what shall I get out of it?

As about the variance in hashing power, please see my above post (and graph). Maybe I was not clear enough as we may have a slight language barrier on my side.

I know that, many thanks! But those are, on one hand, heavily protected wallets and, on the other hand, imagine the consequences if you were to steal one...
I'm asking if it's possible to divert from time to time some hashrate from a large mining pool and to silently crack old lost wallets (very easy passwords, most probably) and so to get 50 easy btc at a time. Clean and repeat, at the expense of pool members... And those would come as free 'bonus' to the actual reward of 25btc..
Have a look at hashrate variation here: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-2k.png
Where does it go approx. 200Th/s?!! Who does it in such a short time and most important why? (It's not so easy to underclock/overclock a mining farm neither to power it on and off) And why does it seem to repeat so frequently and it looks so much like a pattern?!

Hmmm....
So, is it theoretically possible to reconstruct those lost wallets and to get ahold of coins?
Sorry if it sounds so noob-ish (my excuse is I am a noob by all applicable criteria  ) but I can not imagine many holding-water hypotheses for explaining the craziness of mining race. An attempt to crack the wallets (and I assume that for doing the trick a large pool would be needed too) would explain the completely irrational hash-rate increase.
Also, power companies selling their electricity at 3-5x (for now; it used to be a lot higher, maybe 10-15x) market price would explain the hash-rate increase.
And also, another explanation would be the old 'ponzi' etc etc. but I'm not buying that kind.

Please, I'm really interested to get a knowledgeable answer and I'll try to do my best following any references, if provided. I'm asking because for a long time the hashrate is having wild variations, often over 50% in 12-36h and it seems to me that it can not be pure coincidence or statistical variance but rather that someone big is maybe trying something important...
Many thanks!

Not a single word about LTC, how it's going down and how apparently it wants to take BTC with it?
Seriously now, is was just me expecting a decoupling from LTC and some transients along?

Let’s see:
On 27th May, bitstamp issued its proof of reserve at https://www.bitstamp.net/article/Bitstamp-BTC-Proof-of-Reserves-May-2014/ stating they have 183497 BTC in their cold wallet. At that time, price was around 580-590USD. There is a catch: they never disclosed their fiat proof of reserves (afaik not one exchange ever disclosed such info). I suspect fiat reserves were much lower than expected and if they did disclose it, the market would’ve crashed instantly.
Ok. 183497 BTC at 580 USD/BTC is about 106M USD. Since no other info is available, I guess an acceptable assumption one can do is that half (by value in USD equivalent) of accounts were in btc and half were in fiat, i.e. about 91.7k BTC were available for sell at any time if their holders wanted to press the “Sell bitcoins” button.
On the other hand, Bitstamp is only having around 4k BTC in asks at most times, while Huoby somewhere between 10-14k. So, for Bitstamp only 4-5% (4/91.7) BTC seems to be visible in asks while the majority (95-96%) waits on the sidelines. If same ratio applies to Huobi it means the total amount of BTC available for selling on their exchange would be around 240k-335k.
At 1500USD/BTC, to buy what is visible in asks on Bitstamp and Huobi would be like 4+14=28K = 42M USD.
However, the available BTC on the sidelines may jump in and that would require up to 91.7k+335k BTC = 640M USD.

Now, I don’t have data for finex, okcoin, btce and other exchanges but they surely would add quite something to that amount.
Also, I’m not sure if I recall correctly that someone posted the stamp wallet a couple of times since May and it was at around 260k then it grew close to 300k. That would require revising the above figures upwards.

Maybe someone will take it from here but I don’t think 100M USD will do anything visible to the price. Remember that finex has more than 22M in longs and it seems that it couldn’t even stop the downtrend let alone to increase the price even so slightly. So, to get a 4-5x increase in price I suspect we need on the order of 1B USD or more. Yes, there will be a rush in of fresh money but also a rush in of old coins too…
Good part is I think it is still doable of having 100k newcomers each bringing in a fresh 10K USD (in average).

On points that I've added to your post for clarity:

1. Yes, that's market price. However, judging by the last 12 months charts and by the very last auction it seems that market value is still bellow (possibly significantly bellow) market price, isn't it? In other words, market is not in a state of equilibrium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_equilibrium
Please note that apparent stable price (apparent price consolidation) has very little to do with equilibrium.

2. A year ago market cap was almost $14 billion. Did $14 billion flow into Bitcoin? Clearly not. Do market participants believe $14 billion will flow into it? Maybe, maybe not but as we speak it seems not many believe it will do so in the near future. So to respond: no, those 4 billion did not flow into bitcoin at that time but some of the money did flow and that was enough (in terms of amount and flow rate) for many market participants to believe/anticipate/speculate that the rest of the money will flow into, in a reasonable amount of time. We are not far from finding out if their belief was justified or not...

3. Artificial scarcity and low market depth on exchanges can only manipulate the price that much. No, that's not the driving factor. On contrary, why do you think the big stakeholders didn't distribute part of their shares so as to help the ecosystem? Please don't tell me it's because of greed because I won't buy it. Well, so perhaps because they couldn't sell? What's sad imho is that if they can't do it very soon, considering there are a max of 650.000 wallets (possibly only 2-300.000 active bitcoiners as per the excellent recent analysis of Jorge Stolfi) after about 5 years, bitcoin won't have any chance to catch up with mass adoption. We are already lagging well behind the historical growth of mobile phones http://addictivelists.com/top-10-countries-with-most-cell-phone-users-in-2014/ but remember those were back in the 1985. We should have a growth comparable with internet, FB etc. Practically mass adoption is pretty much busted imho and only a strong move followed by a hyper-exponential growth in no. of users can bring us back on track. What strong move? Huge collapse of price & major coin distribution...  toward hoards of new users bringing in yet more people and their fresh money... A huge reset of that kind  is much needed. Each passing day without that happening is exactly the opposite of success but mere a slow move toward fading-out.  That's my view. I don't think bitcoin will die but if it remains a niche product for 5-10-50-100 millions users will be much like failing when compared to it's potential...

To understand my rationale, I've used the equation of enterprise value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_value together with some simplifying assumptions there. (Bitcoin ecosystem is an enterprise, albeit a very unusual one). On major assumption I've made is the enterprise value of bitcoin is growing and will continue to grow (albeit slowly imho). I don't have the proof it is true but I believe you'll accept it. Anyway, throw some figures at it and hopefully you'll agree that at equilibrium a heck of a lot of money will be needed to go from 350 to anything above 2-3k.

I don't get it?!
That's marketcap. Nothing more, nothing less. 
See here: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/031703.asp or here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_capitalization if you're not familiar with it.

Edited to fully respond to the above:  Sorry, but it was simply not implied anywhere that "all 13.6 million bitcoins are traded daily on the exchange".

Did I say or imply that somewhere?!
Maybe my English is not good enough...

Sure. The price may be whatever you want it to be for a small duration of time. Up or down equally. For a fraction of a second you may push it above the last ask. So what? In the next fraction of a second will return back, where is sustainable.
I was talking about equilibrium...
I fully understand you may not like it.

Lol. Nice math you have there...

Think again: 13,6 mil (bitcoins in circulation already) multiplied by 24650USD (25000/target price -350/actual price)
Don't forget to add 3600 fresh btc/day (from mining) multiplied by 200...350days

Good to know!
Then I will try to figure out who will provide the necessary 335-350 billions USD for that to happen...
Any help would be appreciated.

I don't think so. That wall was there yesterday too for quite a long time. It moved a little as it was trying to get the best possible buying position given the price fluctuation but in the end the owner didn't have the chance to get dumped into it before the small take off of today. Now it's slightly lower higher (srry, my bad) than yesterday.
My 2bits...