BBanzai, I get the feeling you think people are hoarding or is there not enough people doing work for/with Bitcoin as far as selling and buying actual items?

I mine; I invest; I make purchases in BTC.  I would sell in BTC too if it were possible in my profession. 

I imagine there are many more like me here, only these are the early days of bitcoin.  Commercial institutions must co-evolve gradually in order to be profitable and legal battles loom.  Give it time.

But I agree with your sentiment: don't "gamble" on bitcoins.  Put some of your USD behind this liberating idea.  Invest and make it happen.

Man, you talk like an evil mastermind. Remind me not to get on your bad side. I imagine my whole life would slowly deteriorate while you plot diabolically to make it worse and worse.

BB, if you tweak your strategy just a bit, your account will increase in both dollars and bitcoins.  On each round trip, sell a fraction fewer bitcoins than you bought.  There is no shame in providing liquidity to an exchange.  It's a valuable service and you deserve to profit from it.

This is a common misconception about market functions.  What good traders will do is smooth out the price.  They are like a capacitor in a parallel DC circuit acting as a voltage reculator. The voltage is the abundance of bitcoins (low price).  If the price were high on Thursday and low on Saturday, then this means the supply on Saturday is over average and Thursday it is under average. If you buy when it is abundant (cheap) and take coins off the market, and sell when it is scarce (high), you smooth out the curve.
This is what grain contracts do which is why the price of wheat does not crash at harvest time. Speculators are buying like crazy, storing, and selling later in the year.  This helps everyone.
Communist Revolutions are lead by violent economically ignorant people and these "speculators" are some of the first to go to the gulags. Why not, they aren't working for a living, the farmers are growing the food and they make money by gambling. Note that some form of famine usually follows a Communist take over as there is not enough food later in the year before the next harvest.

Ronwan, you give me hope.  But bear in mind my sense of time.  If the government shall be cast down as a Golden Calf, then why do the commoners need to starve by the machinations of the financially clever?  How is that an improvement?

neither do i.

i find, however, that approaching them (financial markets) from a different direction can be effective.

and so...  since the vast majority of the trading community appears to rate their own performance in terms of USD, i have decided that it makes the most sense to rate mine in terms of Bitcoin.

If what good traders do, like a capacitor (understood, btw, I know about analog integration), is smooth out the price...then why is an arbitrary number of dollars per chicken, the cost of gasoline, the "value" of your mortgage supposed to double every ten years?  Who is gaming the game?