Possibly these very negative posts do serve a good purpose...By maintaining this as a community of bitcoin devotees who understand this is more than a get-rich-quick scheme, we will grow more steadily and on a firmer foundation.
Speaking as a non-speculating noob, I'm with you. I think it would be tragic for this rather ingenious system to be destroyed by cry-baby speculators. Anyone who knows anything about market pricing should be able to spot a price bubble, and the bitcoin chart is a classic.
Whenever a bubble is forming around a commodity, the talk around those who are speculating is always "this one is different". In this case, there has never been an international cryptocurrency before.
This article is pretty good - it's Australian focused but it applies generally
http://www.rba.gov.au/publications/confs/2003/simon.pdfIf you cant be bothered reading through it all, just look at the charts, the slopes of the lines and all the rest.
When the fuss is over hopefully bitcoin can revert to what it was meant to be - an electronic medium of exchange. I'm never planning on hoarding them, only using them so I don't really care what the price is so long as it is relatively stable in the short term. Volatility of 50% in one week is not doing anyone who is trying to encourage "real" businesses to accept bitcoin any favours (speaking personally)
Tim