Doesn't matter whether its up or down in the future, its extreme fluctuations are pretty much ruining its chances of becoming a widely used currency.
Its starting to prove too much currency risk for merchants to adopt.
In the short term that is true. Bitcoin speculators have a psychological problem. They believe in the technology, but not in mankind's ability to be smart enough to use it. In other words, they have faith in Bitcoin, but not in people. They are jaded by corrupt politicians. However, there are technological solutions to that as well. Statistics is used to solve psychological problems.
Many people believe that we exist in a free market where economics is our tool. They use some statistics to predict patterns. I don't think Bitcoin is broad enough to apply economic theory. Bitcoin is a personal choice. It is our money. Money is very dear to us in a personal way (present company excepted, of course). As such,
Bitcoin requires statistics of how we feel about it. We need more information than the traded price on a few exchanges. We need to know what each and every transaction is (or random samples are) valued at, not just those on the exchanges. Then applying statistics, we can evaluate the real price discovery.
This may be difficult to do, but there are folks working on decentralized exchanges which may be able to address this issue. Until then, enjoy the volatility.
