Thats the irony of it. On another forum someone asked me what solution I was suggesting. I was not suggesting any, frankly, I dont have any.  The only raison d'etre of a currency is facilitating trade. If a currency ends up hurting trade, and only encouraging lottery play, you are doing something wrong.

If people following their instincts leads to a less than desirable outcome, you have to change the system, you cant change human nature, nor can you expect people to go against their nature voluntarily. In this case, the only "fix" I can think off is what most people on this forum consider blasphemy: regulation and taxation.  If anyone can think of a different way to discourage short term speculation, Im all ears, but Im not holding my breath. Even if Mt Gox could and would somehow impose a "tax" on people that convert from dollars to btc and back without there being a real world trade associated with it, all that would do is move everyone to other exchanges. Oh the wonders of a decentralized, deregulated free "currency".

Maybe someone more clever than me will come up with a solution in bitcoin 2.0, but for this attempt, I think we're basically screwed and I will be quite impressed if bitcoin overcomes this catch 22.