On Sunday the Bitcoin price hit a 2014 low of just under $291 on the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index, but as of this afternoon (Wednesday) it had bounced back above $340.

It's just another week in the volatile life of Bitcoin, which around this time last year was just starting a run to its all-time high of over $1,100.

Of course the Bitcoin price is volatile. It's a five-year-old technology that most people had never even heard of until last year. As Bitcoin develops and matures, people will struggle to assess its value.

The good news about Bitcoin price volatility is that, in the long run, these drastic movements really don't matter...

Despite all the digital currency's wild ups and downs, the trends that matter have stayed on a remarkably consistent path, utterly unfazed by price gyrations.

That's because the true measure of the health of Bitcoin can't be found in any price chart.

Bitcoin is a revolution in the concept of money, with an entirely new ecosystem growing up around it. So for the answer to whether Bitcoin is gaining traction or losing steam, you need to look at what's happening in that ecosystem. Is it growing? Is it stalling? Or is it shrinking?

And we just got a new glimpse into the most telling Bitcoin trends...

CoinDesk just yesterday released its "State of Bitcoin" report for the third quarter, and it's packed with statistics that show that just about the only negative development for the digital currency over the past three months has been the 40% decline in the Bitcoin price.

That makes all the other progress that much more remarkable. Across the board, every other measure of Bitcoin success improved.

What's more, several big Bitcoin developments have occurred just in the past week even with Bitcoin prices sinking 69% from their January highs.

Just look at what's been going on...

Let's start with some Bitcoin developments that have happened most recently.

Yesterday, Blockchain, the world's biggest Bitcoin wallet provider, secured $30.5 million in venture capital funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Wicklow Capital - one of the largest venture capital investments ever in a Bitcoin company.

Venture capital investments now total $229.74 million in 2014, 2.5 times the total for all of 2013.

On Monday, Overstock.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: OSTK) Chief Executive Officer Patrick Byrne made the stunning announcement that his proposal to build a stock exchange based on Bitcoin technology had graduated from a wiki page to an actual project called "Medici."

Toward that end, Byrne has already hired two software developers with expertise in building cryptocurrency-based financial services and enlisted a team of lawyers from Perkins Coie to navigate the legal and regulatory obstacles.

Now let's take a look at some of the trends revealed in the CoinDesk report.

The Bitcoin miners, despite the steep rise in difficulty over the past year, continue to invest tens of thousands of dollars in equipment to solve the math problems that create new bitcoins. That they continue to do so in the face of falling Bitcoin prices shows just how much faith they have in a rebound.

The number of merchants accepting Bitcoin rose 21% in the quarter, from 63,000 to 76,000. The number of Bitcoin wallets also rose 21%, from 5.43 million to 6.56 million. So the falling Bitcoin price didn't deter the pace of Bitcoin adoption, either.

And the number of Bitcoin ATMs, which accept cash in exchange for bitcoins, increased 144% from 103 to 251 from the previous quarter.

All of these are signs of a thriving and growing ecosystem.

And while it's not worth worrying about the day-to-day swings in the Bitcoin price, buying a little here and there on the dips could pay off in a big way down the road when the Bitcoin ecosystem becomes fully established.

As the full potential of Bitcoin, particularly the ability of the blockchain to embed data (such as ownership) in transactions becomes realized, the Bitcoin value will rise.

Right now, the infrastructure for that ecosystem is under construction, so it's not so easy to see what's really happening.

"There are 500 or 600 Bitcoin companies creating an amazing infrastructure out there that will really transform our economy," Tim Draper, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, told CNBC Tuesday. Draper won all of the nearly 30,000 bitcoins that were auctioned by the U.S. Marshals Service back in June. "I think we're actually in the lull right now before the big huge storm."

When that infrastructure is built we will see higher Bitcoin prices. How high is a matter of much speculation, but a report this week from Pantera Capital, which operates a Bitcoin hedge fund, estimated one Bitcoin could someday be worth just under $4.3 million.

That's not a bad return on an investment of $340, even if you have to wait a while to get it.

Follow me on Twitter @DavidGZeiler.

UP NEXT: While focusing on the decline in the Bitcoin price, the mainstream media tends to ignore less dramatic but positive developments for the digital currency. Last month, for example, the first U.S. Bitcoin derivative started trading. Here's why this is a big deal for businesses that want to start using Bitcoin...

Related Articles:

• CNBC: Bitcoin Calm Before the Storm: DFJ's Draper

• CoinDesk: State of Bitcoin Q3 2014: Ecosystem Maturing Amid Price Pressure