Even before the price stabilizes (if it ever does) a fund can approach bitcoin trading like forex, and make dollar/euro/etc profit if implementing successful trading strategies and convert that to gold, silver, & real estate. From what I can see, only CampBX is offering short selling currently, and they are not live with it.
https://campbx.com/faq.phpIf bitcoin exchanges have grown based on mining, ecommerce, and a limited number of websites offering the forex currency trading, there has been little short selling in the bitcoin market traditionally. Because of this bitcoin exchange rates could be vulnerable as a fixed currency to attacks by short sellers backed by large amounts of capital in traditional currencies.
Mainstream financial press have been negative towards bitcoin recently, compared to the mass of coverage that accompanied the exchange rate spike. "Critical mass" would be defined as a sustained trend where more money was flowing into bitcoin continually from other currencies via exchange than was being withdrawn by users -or- the attainment of some percentage of GDP in a market for sales conducted in bitcoin?
