Quote from: Nagle on July 05, 2011, 03:16:55 PM

Quote from: AyeYo on July 05, 2011, 01:10:17 PM

Quote from: 5grainsilver on July 05, 2011, 02:19:56 AM

Just because merchants are accepting bitcoin doesn't mean people are going out and buying bitcoins to spend at said merchants. And guess what those merchants are doing a soon as they receive bitcoins as payment for goods and services?

Bingo

Any merchant who accepts Bitcoins needs to cash out really fast. We're seeing 25% changes in a day, and 10% changes in 10 minutes. By the time a Bitcoin transaction is confirmed, it may have lost 10% of its value. You can't run a business on that.

And the faster they convert to their nation's preferred currency, the faster bitcoin will fall in value. Speculators and investors would see keen interest to sell as a signal that the price is going down. They then wait for the price to fall. Those people using bitcoin for real commerce are no doubt vastly outnumbered at the moment by miners and speculators willing to sell.

I'm watching bitcoin's price with interest as it falls through the $14 and $13 marks. It's still going, at around $12.50 as I write this. It may be partly related to the long weekend in the USA. Bitcoin's price has historically fallen on weekends. But something feels different this time. Everyone expects the cycle to occur, and when it becomes common knowledge it's almost by definition not going to happen again for the same reasons.