Everything eventually comes to an end. Some sooner than others.

The volatility makes it less useful as a medium of exchange. If you accept 100 bitcoins in exchange for some hardware and the next day those 100 bitcoins are worth 15% less, you may wind up taking a loss on the transaction. This matters because you typically can't pay your employees, pay your utility bills, pay your rent, or pay your suppliers in bitcoins.

Otherwise, the price of a bitcoin measures a whole bunch of things mixed together. One of the things it measures is the collective opinion of the long-term viability of bitcoins as a medium of exchange. But that's mixed in with so many other factors that you really draw too many conclusions.

I think a lot of people just assume that a high price is good and a low price is bad without really thinking too much about it. They confuse the price of a bitcoin with things like the price of a company's stock.

Whoever says bitcoin is dead is an idiot

Ragnar, don't mind them too much. It's a common reaction at the end of a speculative bubble.

Nobody knows whether Bitcoin will live, neither now nor did anyone five months ago. You will hear hundreds of short-sighted arguments why it "must fail". I'll name a few in the order they appeared.

"Deflation will make price rise over 9000 but then nobody can use it because everyone will only hoard"
"It was all a ponzi scheme, now the inventors are taking their money and running"
"Volatility is so high, nobody will ever use them for trade"

If you pay attention, you will see that these arguments aim at short time-scales. Nobody will hoard forever, initial distribution is unimportant once coins have moved around, and volatility is paid by bad speculators, which means it will decrease over time.

There are some problems with Bitcoin, but they can be fixed, and have nothing to do with the things the doomsayers name.

how so if we cant even trade with such volatility? what does a payment system do without a transaction?
 

You know exactly what i meant, can you use bitcoin to put food on the table?

If not, you will have to fall back to fiat currency.

Bitcoin isnt a curreny, its a mean for transferring money which isnt gonna happen if the exchange is so volatile.

That was deep.

Dude, I use it as a currency almost daily.

You seem to think that just because many receivers of the coins will desire dollars instead, that such will always be the case. You assume it's static, not realizing that as the economy matures the need to "convert back" lessens over time.

Bitcoin becomes a common currency gradually, and for some of us it is already very much a currency now. And no I'm not a large holder of coins, only about 200... I had more yesterday but I paid someone, and in fact I received most of them by doing work for other people. It's almost like... a currency! And no fees + transferable instantly around the world.

So... what would convince you?  What if you could pay 10% of your expenses using bitcoin, and it cost you 1% less if you used bitcoin?

There are lots of chicken-and-egg problems that bitcoin has to overcome to compete with the dollars or euros we're all using now; I see two paths to bitcoin's success:

Maybe there are enough ideologically motivated people to form a self-sustaining economy. If even 1% of people find the idea of bitcoin attractive and started using it for 1% of their transactions that would still be huge.

Or maybe one or more 'killer apps' for bitcoin will emerge, giving it a foothold in certain markets. Maybe it will never expand beyond those markets, or maybe it'll slowly grow beyond them because of lower cost and higher tech.

If you're not excited by the idea of being an early adopter for what could be a massively influential idea, then you should probably come back in three or four years and either tell us "Told you it'd never work!" or join what should, by then, be a much more stable and easier-to-use system.

This is the key, I've been doing everything I can to urge other leftist ideologues to adopt Bitcoin to create an egalitarian economy, it will take a few years to catch on but the ability of Bitcoin to ease redistribution of wealth will make it the inevitable choice once people tire of trying to work inside the same old broken system.