It's also very difficult to purchase BTC in the US right now, which still seems to be the biggest market by far. Keep an eye on the places where new users congregate and you'll see how frustrated they are about getting into Bitcoin. Just over the past couple of months, casual users have had their money held hostage by Bitfloor, locked up by Mt. Gox, and last week, Bit Instant (which is well-funded) temporarily closed up shop. It will take time to rebuild confidence outside of early adopters
That's exactly what I attribute June's/early July's slide to, rather than an extended post-bubble deflation. How things go at MtGox in these next couple of weeks will have a big effect.
If they're not lying about having their withdrawal backlog cleaned up in a couple of weeks, things should be OK. Unfortunately, they've long been prone to fibbing.
Remember back in April just before the bubble burst, the tweeted that their new SSDs (to replace the HDDs in their overworked servers) were in transit and would take a day to prepare and then a half-day shutdown to fully implement?
The very next day, their servers failed "due to their own success" and the next day they announced a 12 hour hiatus "to cool the market down", when it seems they were really installing their SSDs.
MtGox speak with forked tongue. Bad MtGox.
