TUNNEL VISION:
"Look the price went from $266 to $50. Gold went from $1600 to $1300.
Ignore the previous price action because it is irrelevant."
lol
+1
Also,
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, such that we all lose!!
So not only should those "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 activities unprofitable.
It's not like you don't know what's going on when you see the same traders high frequency bidding your basis up with low volume "egg-on" buy/sells. By permitting out of range bids to execute at the same cost single player can rapidly bid the price up 20-30% by burning through as little as a hundred bucks, then sell his thousands into it.
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" 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.
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 a mechanism that (profitably for the exchanges and us all) simply impedes bubbles, without breaking the laws of supply and demand.