The TOTAL volume at mtg today was 681 coins. 681.
There are over 6.4M coins in the market (not counting lost coins).
Because the prices are rising, people are holding them. Unfortunately, that means if you want to get bitcoins, you have to pay a premium, because they aren't circulating. No one is USING them.
Silk Road isn't the problem (though a Tor accessible website as the only place to really USE coins doesn't give the soccer mom a warm fuzzy).
If you want the economy to thrive, then sell and/or trade some of the coins you're holding on to.
Guess what will happen eventually? No one will WANT the coins, because they couldn't get any. Guess how much the coins you're hoarding will be worth when no one want them?
My apologies, I in fact was misled by the mtg graph of volume. I expected an end-of-day graph to be volume for the previous day, when in fact it "reset" and was volume for the new day. My bad.
However, the point is still the same. 22,000 BTC volume for a day against a population of 6.4M coins is 0.3% of the available coins.
By comparison the trade volume of ONLY the US Dollar and the AUS Dollar amount to 25% of the total circulating dollars per day (
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-trading-currencies-2010-10). The total US Currency Population is approximately $930 Billion (
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2697687/posts and
http://www.visualeconomics.com/the-value-of-united-states-currency-in-circulation/). We need to see trading volumes in the Bitcoin market approach 1.6M coins, per day, to see the same type of "stability" the US Dollar has. Will that drive the price of BTC down? Absolutely. But guess what, that price will be much more stable and much closer to the realistic value of a single BTC. Right now the prices are due to hoarding, and that's not sustainable, it WILL crash.
I'm not a naysayer of Bitcoins. I believe in them. But if we as a community want them to succeed, you have to use them. Otherwise, BTC aren't going to be a currency, they're going to be an asset. I have assets, my MacBook Pro is an asset.
Put it this way. There are people with WAY over 21,000 BTC in their combined Wallets. What would happen if they decided to sell all of them right now at the "peak" of the market?
Only ONE person gets to sell at the peak. Once they've sold, it pushes the prices down. If that sale is large enough, it will devalue the current BTC market itself significantly. Once people start seeing BTC drop significantly in value, guess what will happen? More people will jump to sell because they're seeing the investment they thought was worth X quickly become X-Y, while Y continues to grow.
The smartest people in the Bitcoin market are selling coins every day. Because if they can convert their current stash of coins into US Dollars and do it slowly enough to not impact the market, they'll win.
Lesson: If you aren't selling coins every day, you're running the SIGNIFICANT risk of rapidly losing a significant amount of money.
Your "gains" are unrealized until you have something else in your possession. Doesn't matter what it is, a shiny new MacBook Pro, or an iPad, or Amazon gift cards, doesn't matter. But until you have something ELSE of value that you've used Bitcoins to acquire, your gains are unrealized and you run the risk of never realizing them.