Volatility won't "go away", but it may diminish over time if bitcoin becomes a currency and not a commodity. It will, however, still be a deflationary currency which means the value of an amount of bitcoin should trend upwards. So if this gains traction as a currency and the speculators stop rushing the numbers up higher than what the economy can actually support, BTC might find a stable deflation rate and its volatility should diminish. (I'm actually very skeptical of both deflationary currencies and bitcoin in particular, but this is the bitcoin proponents' theory as I understand it.)
To think bitcoin can acquire a stable deflation rate is to assume that the economy stops cycling, that's simply not going to happen. Every boom will cause a massive deflation period, it can't be stable.
Speculation is the least of bitcoin's problems. I think a crypto-currency is inevitable, but it'll be one that has a mechanism in it to inflate and deflate to match the demand for currency in the market. During a boom there's a higher demand for currency and the supply must increase if prices are to remain stable, otherwise deflation is going to happen in an amount that matches the boom; that's not stable.
The government has more than one control over the current money supply, fractional reserve lending allows the money supply to grow and shrink as demand requires while the fed attempts to maintain an overall small inflation rate to avoid the ill effects of deflation.
> Who cares if prices stay stable or not?
Everyone who understand economics even a little bit.
> The value represented by whatever price is attached to those things won't change
People aren't paid in value and they don't spend value, they're paid in currency and they spend currency and they all care that prices are stable because their paychecks aren't going to suddenly change.
Once something functions as a mature currency, everything is priced against it, so it is no longer volatile.
In contrast, when something functions as a commodity, it is highly volatile.
Right now, bitcoin functions as a commodity, but perhaps someday, it will function as a mature currency.
As a side note, your comment is bizarre. There is no reason to think a fixed supply would lead to volatility. Quite the opposite. A changing supply leads to volatility. You can still avoid high volatility in that case if the rate of change is well-established and the people controlling the rate of change are trusted (as is the case now with the USD, but perhaps that will not always be so).
> Once something functions as a mature currency, everything is priced against it, so it is no longer volatile.
The economy isn't nearly so simple. Pricing something in a currency doesn't automatically make the currency stable, a stable currency comes from the currency having enough liquidity to serve as a means of exchange for the wealth it's representing but not too much. Any sudden increase or decrease in that represented wealth will cause demand for the currency to either increase or decrease and a currency fixed in supply cannot increase/decrease supply to match the demand so it must necessarily inflation/deflate in value instead.
> As a side note, your comment is bizarre. There is no reason to think a fixed supply would lead to volatility.
It's not at all bizarre if you think about it, a fixed currency will always be volatile because the wealth it represents isn't fixed, markets grow and shrink and if the currency can't then a booming market automatically means currency deflation because that fixed amount of currency must now represent a larger amount of wealth creation. With a fixed currency, a boom in productivity and wealth creation will cause massive deflation in the currency.
I honestly don't know how anyone thinks a fixed amount of currency can possibly work when the wealth it's standing in for is not fixed. The market cycles up and down continually and the supply of currency, if prices are to be kept stable, must also.
You can't have stable prices with a fixed amount of currency, it's not logical. One of them will cycle to match the market's ups and downs. So either prices will be violate or the currency must allow inflation/deflation of the currency supply to keep prices stable.
I think you are actually making very good points, and I learned something.
That said, I am not assuming a major boom/bust cycle, so given that assumption, our two positions are easily reconcilable.
I am assuming a steady rate of growth of the global economy. In that case, there is deflation over time, yes, but investors known that ahead of time, so some of it is already priced into the value of the currency.
I think that the boom-bust cycles are vastly exacerbated by regulatory intervention. For instance, the current recession we are in in the US was entirely caused by Fannie and Freddie buying tons of shit mortgages for decades and the notion of "too big to fail" plus regulatory pressure leading to unhealthy consolidation and gambling in the banking industry.
In a truly free market (which maybe we will never see again so who cares), there may still be glitches in the market that cause temporary busts, but those should become increasingly rare over time as the economic system becomes more globalized, robust, and decentralized.
