It is a vicious circle of sorts

You can't spend your bitcoins (apart from gambling them away) until there are enough merchants ready to accept them. But merchants won't accept bitcoins unless there is enough demand for their merchandise being paid for with bitcoins. Some people say that the merchants won't start accepting Bitcoin en masse till its price stabilizes a little, and there is certainly a grain of truth in this claim. But how the price will ever stabilize if people are using Bitcoin mainly for speculation since they basically have only two options available to them, i.e. either to hoard bitcoins or trade them? Thus we are volens-nolens back to square one