I've been talking with a friend of mine for over two years about investing in Bitcoin. He is not at all interested. He calls it bubblecoin and has a point. Bitcoin will always trade at plus or minus 50% or more and will never stabilize. There is no plan to create any stabilizing factor. Simply expanding the user base will not stop people from pumping and dumping and causing panics. If this were true, then small countries would generally have unstable currencies and large countries would have stable currencies.
Price is psychological and there are no psychological tools to create faith in the price stability, nor is there even any discussion about it. Psychology, sociology, and economics uses statistics to create useful tools. Bitcoin uses "invisible hands" of the free market. Analysts use statistics to look at the market, but their results are not peer reviewed, nor even publicly available. Market analysts are the soothsayers of economics. We need a useful predictive tool for Bitcoin price that is useful for business.
The solution is childsplay but first you have to understand the essentials:
About Bitcoin:A Bitcoin is a commercial "over the counter (OTC) derivative" of the current-past value and future possible values of itself and it's network, which are only (at best) completely deregulated commercial resources, and neither "commodity futures" nor "securities"
as per the CFMA of 2000. This is why, with it's "penny-stock market" exchange-value changing every 15 seconds, it is useless as a "money" because you need an hour to accept and/or spend it, and never
really[/] know what it will be worth come (future) selling time. It's current wildly unstable, disparate and volatile exchange-values are really only very useful as a delayed-exchange "funding" funded-swap medium.
The "exchange-value" (price) inflation and deflation of Fiat Bitcoins has squat to do with any "monetary supply" of them and (foreseeably) never, ever will!
Market speculators and their fiat-antics capriciously determine the latest (stale) fiat exchange-value of the last fiat Bitcoin that past their way.
The actual "price" of any given Bitcoin remains forever unknown and unknowable until after it has been re-sold (re-exchange valued) to the next guy, in the future.
The best way to think of the exchange-value of Bitcoins is as a kind of a "virtual toilet" which, regardless of what has been dumped through it, only bears the memory-value of the position that it's last user left the seat in, to it's own current owner, alone. Bitcoin functions exactly in much the same way as a "funded" Credit Default Swap (fCDS). You fund it's former owner's "loss" (costs) on it, and the next owner funds yours.
This and it's other features make it ideal as a delayed patient "credit swap" Medium of Exchange between two sophisticated parties, but other factors make it a totally or nearly useless commercial Medium of Labour Exchange Currency like other stable, dependable and reliably valued things that "currently" serve that purpose.
The way BTC is kicked around by it's bone-headed "exchangers" as if it were "somebody else's" trashy penny stock, it will never be stably valued enough to be considered as a competitive Medium of Labour Exchange "currency" by anyone who might wish to contract, conduct business nor any serious large or long-term transactions in it. (let alone loan it LOL)
The stupid Bitcoin "penny stock market" Exchangers
Agentbluescreen, I like your thoughts on exchanges creating incentive mechanisms to discourage volatility. I think that exchanges might realize it is in their long-term best interest to see BTC survive, and while the short-term gains are realized best from big, fast, scary swings up and down, this is really the quickest way to kill BTC and therefore destroy the very basis of their existence. Imagine if the stock market were as volatile as BTC... the economy would be a mess! This is a currency we're talking about, not a penny stock. The best part is, we don't even need any sort of government regulation or oversight - we'd just need the biggest, most popular exchanges to start THINKING and acting like exchanges. For instance, not allowing even a SECOND of lag because this is simply not how a professional exchange operates. If your system doesn't work, pull the plug until it's fixed. Blind trading makes you lots of money in the short term due to panic sells, but is really dangerous for any market in the long run.
Well this is the whole deal. Certainly it has to always continue to rise in value or "gradually deflate" (simply our profits or "interest" for adopting and spreading the adoption and wider use, ever-more widely of our "money") but we can't ever be pleased to see it inflate,(devalued) such that we all lose!!
So not only should those "$5 Bitcoin Pharaohs" who have profited most immensely from it be eager to support it, but our exchanges have to stop thinking like penny-stock markets, by actually assisting speculators to long and short it excessively without any sturdy disincentives to deter or make such deliberately mischievous attacks upon our currencies value unprofitable.
Exchangers: It's not like you don't know what's going on when you see the same fat wallet speculative traders high frequency bidding your basis up with low volume spread price "egg-on" buy/sell orders. By permitting out of range bids to execute at the same cost as rational fair bargaining bids (for more patient bargain seekers) a single player can rapidly bid the price through 20-30% by burning through as little as a hundred bucks, then buy or sell his thousands into it, causing scary and catastrophic volatilities to be triggered.
So really it's quite a simple and automatic dampening system you need like an "arithmetic shock absorber". There are two things you have to control, the number of and value-levels of (valid, permissible) bid/ask slots about the "current basis", and a progressive scale of "trading slot fees"(for them) that increase exponentially the further they deviate from the "current basis" value.
Of course you may need to keep (out of range) buy-limits there too,(without fee penalty) for support.
The number of buyers or sellers are irrelevant, only their positions their goals and the weights of their wallets are.
Usually sellers sell at the buy price and buyers buy at the sell price but often the buyers go short and the sellers go long, to "bargain".
Eventually an impatient buyer must go long enough to get a buy or an impatient seller must go short enough to make a sale, especially if a larger quantity is involved.
Those two smallish "bridging a spread" labours capriciously move the last market price (spread bounds range limits) up or down, over-valueing or devaluing the pretend "currency" like a hooked swordfish but that is not the real problem.
Any larger transactor (who we desperately want and need more of like big retailers) who must obtain or clear large amounts is always forced to very painfully suffer a much lower or higher than market price, (vaulting the spreads) and the larger the quantities, the bigger those (nasty) spreads get and remain, left behind them. It's not like they can go to a flush "money-changer" and buy or sell the particular given price.
They have to go into the "penny-stock exchanges" penny-order book and find a bid that will get them all the cash or BTC they need to transact.
In fact the critical challenge to Bitcoin transactions other than a stable price, is the actually practical value of liquidity a given transactor can move through an exchange at or around a given price within a practical period of time, which argues for a much, much more highly valued Bitcoin (eg $1,000-$10,000-$100,000), specific pre-determined bid-rung levels about the "current median-basis price" with exponentially higher fee punishments for further out of bounds bids, and for tighter daily transaction frequency limits also punished by exponentially higher fees. So you accomplish three goals; making simple exchanges at current value the "cheapest fee trades", and you make wildly out of range bids or asks that may stampede the market in either direction costly to place the further they go, you keep bids and asks within a given "basis-centric" range and ladder, while you still preserve "support level" bids.
The way I see it is as an automatic mathematically derived dampening mechanism that (profitably for the exchanges and us all) simply impedes upwards bubbles, and large gulfs in ongoing median trading prices, by tweaking, rather than breaking the laws of (monetary) supply and demand.