Bitcoin value is ridiculously volatile, we should be hoping that we will have a far more stable value than bitcoin has.
Bitcoin continues still after all these years to keep changing the prices of everything, you can check the price of something in bitcoins, decide it seems affordable, dig out your offline wallet machine from your vault, set it up, figure out which of your online machines has the most up to date blockchain on it, fire up a bitcoin client on it, wait for the blockchain to get up to date, go through whatever steps are required to get the online machine and the offline machine to agree about a transaction to move offline funds online or to send offline funds directly to the merchant from who you wanted to buy something, and find that the price has already changed.
Some payment processors only give you 15 minutes to send coins once you have found out from them what the price of what you want to buy is and lock it in for 15 minutes, so maybe if you get so practiced at the whole business of getting coins out of your offline wallet inside of 15 minutes you are okay, but otherwise you are very likely to find the price has already changed.
Hopefully with devcoins we can much faster move toward setting wages and prices directly in devcoins.
For example once various sites like devtome get their share directly to the site instead of directly to their employees/team/authors/workers, they can know how much devcoin they have in their kitty and set pay in devcoins instead of in shares. So workers will know how many devcoins they will be getting instead of having to wait to see how much a share happens to be by the time they get it.
Hopefully we can also set prices of services directly in devcoins too. For example we could have a food site that pays people per thousand grams of food produced or per thousand weeds pulled or whatever, and, having paid the workers in devcoins to produce the food, we'd know, once the food is harvested, how many devcoins it cost to produce it, thus we would be in a position to price it in devcoins directly when offering it for sale.
Possibly devcoin might be just the right coin with which to develop the entire supply-chain all the way up from the ground, the wind, the rain, sunlight, seeds and labour.
Free open source quarrying and lumber-jacking, free open source stonemasonry and brickmaking and carpentry and architecture - how to build affordable simple housing from local materials or from sustainable materials located nearby, or free open source materials so revolutionary that shipping them from a distance is actually more sustainable and more environmentally friendly than using local materials, whatever, basically free open source shelter so people can shelter from the elements and such while eating our free open source foodstuffs.
(I categorise clothing as shelter since it seems to me that unless clothing provides shelter it maybe is really not as totally essential to survival as shelter is; shelter from prurient eyes is maybe not always more life-or-death than shelter from inclement weather/elements.)
Maybe if we are to try to make our currency stable we should try to make it stable in relation to food and clothing/shelter more importantly than stable in relation to hideously volatile things like penny-stocks, bitcoins, tradeable pokemon-cards, fiat currencies and so on?
Maybe we could even reach a point where when the number of dollars it costs for a loaf of bread increases the number of devcoins it costs does not increase?
Would something like that constitute being even more stable than the fiat in terms of which the price of bread increased?
-MarkM-
I agree the only way to instigate stability is a known static generation rate but all these things will be possible in far future when the project will grow to a point of self sufficience. As block reward stops halving market cap would have grown to allow funding of bigger projects and at the point they split off the price will stabalize because of constant generation