Topic: The necessity of removing the volatility of the BTC price...? (Read 456 times)

Definitely the volatility of the price of bitcoins is hampering its adoption.

As already explained, this is because very few people use it for real transactions. It is still mostly speculative.

I think that long term volatility will remain for years, and actually I think that's a good thing, because we want the price to go up a hundred or a thousand times. It's hard to imagine that it will go up so much in a perfectly straight line. Expect double digit percentage swings to remain for years.

What is important right now is the very short term volatility, the percentage swings that occur over a few minutes.

Realistically, nearly all merchants want to be paid in fiat currency, because all their expenses are as such. Middlemen such as BitPay, Coinbase and BIPS accept the bitcoins and pay the merchant with fiat currency. But if the very short term volatility is high, then these middleman will need to offer bigger spreads for the additional risk that they are taking, and so the customer is worse off. Hopefully the growth in usage of bitcoins will reduce the very short term volatility which will allow the spreads to reduce (through competition) and customers will be better off.

And then hopefully the merchants will then be able to pay some of their bills with bitcoins...

Bitcoin will always be volatile because, as Birdy pointed, the market is too small.

But it is a problem.
Who will use it as a real currency? No one.
If you can get 1 btc for your house in August, and only buy a chair with this single btc in September

It's not possible to have an independant global currency with a market this small without volatility.
Even other currencies are still a bit volatile, you just don't see it when trading only in this currency.

Once Bitcoin has grown enough that people accept in a whole supply chains, it will not matter anymore.
Bitpay is a service needed to let growth happen despite the volatilty.

How important is it that the price of BTC is stable for extended periods, in order for BTC to be widely adopted and what are possible solutions to stabilize the volatility?

Also, I believe BitPay and CoinBase remove this volatility for merchants by exchanging the BTC soon after a transaction is processed, does this not defeat the purpose of BTC? As such, the merchant should use the received BTC within their supple chain, but this can only happen if parties within the supply chain accept BTC. The volatility of BTC prevents this....