Metrics to Study the Bitcoin Economy I'm creating a course on the Bitcoin on Udemy that serves as both an introduction to the bitcoin and also a source to explain how mining and speculation work. I'm working on lecture three which is on the bitcoin economy and I'm wondering what metrics I should include to explain how one can understand the bitcoin economy. So far I have the following:

Distribution of Wealth
Supply and Demand
Exchanges (by trade volume) 
Currencies exchanged for bitcoins
Pools (by hash volume)
Oligarchiness (the influence any one group has on the bitcoin)

It appears that blockchain has the most accessible data for neophytes. Are there any other data pools you'd recommend for people to use?
Though it might not help much with economics, if you run a node then you can also gather information on orphaned blocks, IP addresses, and unconfirmed transactions (some of which may never confirm, if insufficient transaction fee is paid or the transaction size is too big).

Gathering statistics on Bitcoin is tough, as little can be collected reliably about Bitcoin users. Other questions have looked at that issue here and here.

It's generally impossible to even prove that particular bitcoins have not been destroyed (eg the exchange that apparently lost its wallet when Amazon EC2 crashed), though in some cases proof can be given they were destroyed (where bitcoins are sent to a particular address that nobody can realistically have the private key for). I suppose in that regard it's no different to cash.

You might also be able to get some idea of publicity and levels of user interest from activity levels on bitcointalk.org, reddit.com/r/bitcoin and Google search statistics