Instability prevents merchants from adopting BitCoin, thereby preventing it from becoming a currency.  This is a problem, unless you're a speculator.


Price stability is only a problem to speculators.


I am actually trying to if you haven't noticed.  Thanks for the words of encouragement.  How exactly will we lose a lot of money if no one puts in more than a few cents?


Central banks have not been successful, ever, in the history of mankind.  They never successfully created a stable enough store of wealth that it was used as a currency.  They have never created anything that was ever used as a currency except for every currency accepted by the mainstream market.

The foreign exchange market never shows evidence of any two currencies tending to hold relatively stable values versus each other.  It never shows price fluctuations of an order of magnitude less than BitCoin shows routinely.  It never reports data about currencies being stable, they're always jumping willy-nilly all over the graph, doing exactly nothing predictable, because that's what all currencies do.

Let me throw out a blanket statement here, no matter how much I hate them as a rule:

Only speculators want the market to stay volatile.

Anyone who wants it to be a currency, wants the value to be stable, as this is a prerequisite for use as a currency.  If you didn't already realize this, I understand.  Many people in the BitCoin economy are new to the ideas underlying economics.  But it is bad for a currency to fluctuate wildly - price instability makes it tougher for people to use it as an actual gauge of value, which is what currency is supposed to represent.

Either decide you're a speculator, and that you want the volatility for your personal profit margins, or decide you want BitCoin to succeed as a currency and help find ways to stabilize it.