There was a saying that emerged in the first .com boom -- "You know we're in trouble when the UPS guy is giving you Internet stock tips." Maybe we should ask the UPS guy every few months what he's excited about investing in? Canary in the coal mine, as it were...
I'll agree that the "UPS guy" metric is useful, but only because it shows when a certain kind of madness has infected the rest of society. When even people who aren't paid to promulgate nonsense are blinded by their enthusiasm.
The key to acting opposite to the behavior of contrarian indicator requires knowing all their other behavior patterns.
The original saying dates back to the great depression and was likely more accurate than the UPS guys generalization. If I recall correctly I first read about it in a book called Zurich Axioms.
Looked it up found the story somewhere else. http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...
The thing about money and markets is it all relative(%).
Whenever talking on these topics people revert to absolute($) comparisons, this is where most analysis breaks.
I am not arguing or commenting on bitcoin success, just that your mention of "order of magnitude" sounds like an absolute value.
However, in this case, the discussion were about the "popularity", or the "reach" of bitcoin. The underlying assumption (by me) is that absolute value would strongly correlate with the number of people knowing about bitcoin, hence the absolute number remark.
I knew the Web was going to be big when people who could not be troubled to learn what a paragraph style is in Word were hanging on my every word, taking notes, and buying books about how to install a 3rd party IP stack in Windows.
There's a difference between the UPS guy having an opinion about something and going out of his way to learn about something with a fairly steep learning curve.
'when the barber is getting into the oilfield, it's time to get out'