I do spot a zero sum game, but I think you're overlooking one thing: the real value of Bitcoin itself. Something has to offset that, and that's where the real gain comes from. A technology was created out of nothing but ingenuity.
A zero sum is all the winners minus all the losers. But everyone is "winning" something of real value: a revolutionary technology, a way to bank without banks.
Imagine if we called Apple a zero-sum game: the value of all of the iMacs and iPhones, minus the price people paid for them, equals zero. It ignores the fact that iMacs and iPhones are intrinsically useful.
I didn't mean to imply that bitcoin had no value, far from it.
I meant to say that anyone who has a "trading strategy" is a damn fool.
In the end (when this new bubble explodes), lots of money will have
changed hands, a few lucky guys will have made a nice chunk, the
exchange will have profited greatly (bookies always do) and the vast
majority of the dumbasses who think they can "beat the market" will
have gotten shafted.
What I was trying to say is that I don't care what the BTC/USD exchange
rate is, as long as it remains either stable, or at the very least, predictable:
my bet is that over the last 6 months, the exchange rate stability around $2
has done as much if not more for bitcoin's actual acceptance than all the combined
excitement of the first half of 2011.
It really doesn't matter what you care about. The market doesn't care. Traders don't care. Lament all you want, but it won't change anything, and it won't help stabilize the price no matter how much you want it.
