But speculation isn't entirely worthless. Greed is human nature, to a large extent, short sellers, day traders and HFT bots actually counter human greed because they believe in price convergence. About 80% of trading in forex market is speculative, but they indeed make the rest 20% better off.
I always believe that the best way to counter bubbles is HFT. HFT bots catch tiny profits and destroy the dreams of greedy "investors". What's buy-low-sell-high? It's price stability.
At the beginning, speculative trading may cause volatility because of the market power being controlled by a few hands. So we need more speculators. They provide liquidity for everyday bitcoin transactions. They bring Bitcoin closer to our real world economy.
Without speculation, we can hardly produce any goods or services in Bitcoins efficiently.
If there's anything harm about speculators, it means we need more of them, not less, in absolute figures. The way to make the pie bigger is to convince real world merchants to accept Bitcoin, but not criticize the speculators and ask them to provide services instead.
Few points:
#1: Hoarding bitcoins is not like putting money in a bank. The money on "forex" is not being hoarded...its being put to use. The forex acct doesnt take physical receipt of the money and just sit on it.....unlike you. At best, the money you get is working for the govt economy, not bitcoin.
#2: Bitcoin speculators dont provide liquidity....all traders do is seize up the supply and hope the price rises....creating an artifical bubble of higher prices....making it more EXPENSIVE and thus less work(and trading) gets done. All they do is create
paper profits and losses, not economic gains. The only people you get to trade are more speculators.
#3: The problem with speculative bubbles of your kind is they are leveraged....so not only is something amiss, we dont even know if you can handle the exposure and all your contracts can be unwound. That includes depending on you not to bet against your customers.
Its kind of interesting that you are so against providing your bitcoins to be put to use. Im always looking for that in any currency, since that means interest on my holdings. You make it sound like this is OWS(Occupy WallSt)....not the case. A growing bitcoin economy only makes your position better in the long run.