Bitcoin Forum

Every cryptocurrency has an intrinsic volatility at this moment as every chart out there clearly shows.

As you all know this can affect their widespread adoption in online retail in a negative way (it's a bit hard to pay suppliers next month if your income halved in value yesterday imho), my question is, what solution can there be?

State currencies remain stable thanks to a regulated environment, do you think there is any other solution, different from a state regulated context, to this pivotal problem?

I don't believe that any currency will just go on and "stabilize itself" as long as speculators and traders exist..

are crypto destined to be commodities?

The jury is still out on where it all goes; but for now, in every cryptocoin system to date, speculators have vastly outnumbered those who would actually use the instrument as a currency in the long run. Too many look upon cryptocoins merely as platforms for get-rich-quick schemes, and these holders are quite content to turn cryptocurrencies into digital tulips. In theory, volatility should decrease over a long time, but that may be a very long time, and in the meantime, legitimate adopters (who are the very ones who would stabilize the system) are inhibited from entering. A next-generation cryptocurrency might contain code that would respond to bubble conditions by flooding the system with extra units and to crashes by withdrawing units as needed; but no such thing has been created to date. More user-friendly software that the average person can comfortably and conveniently use would help, too. Some progress on that front is being made, but it is still slow.

A couple good recent articles on the volatility subject:

http://garzikrants.blogspot.ca/2013/11/solution-to-bitcoin-volatility.html (http://garzikrants.blogspot.ca/2013/11/solution-to-bitcoin-volatility.html)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/09/heres-why-volatility-isnt-a-big-problem-for-bitcoin/ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/09/heres-why-volatility-isnt-a-big-problem-for-bitcoin/)

why don't try?

I can't open the washingtonpost link but I had a look at Jeff Garzik's article and it's very good.
The idea of creating a currency which reacts to bubbles is interesting but at the same time it cannot be used with PoW hence bitcoin.
I don't understand this "volatility issue" with bitcoin, merchants can use services like bitpay to attract more buyer and cash out to FIAT instantly.

Volatility is natural with new currencies. Hopefully it'll stabilise in the future, but it's still early days for Bitcoin.

It's hard for people to say with certain that bitcoin won't continue to be heavy speculative.  But the general assumption seems to be as the market grows it becomes harder and harder for people to manipulate it and things stabilize.

There's already some solutions/options for merchants who accept bitcoin that reduce the risk of volatility and that area continues to improve. So I'm not too worried about that.

If we get more institutional investors, then I think the Bitcoin exchange rates will stabilize. Short selling is causing the volatility. Need to clamp down on it.  ???

Maybe, but not for now. The volatility comes from uncertainty. A much bigger problem are possible statistical third moments (volatility is 2nd derivative of price), i.e. tails, which are not even in the historic data set. It can't be ruled out that bitcoin drops by say 90% in a day.

In the end low volatility would mean that the price increase is limited. There are theoretically possibilities of pegging, but I don't think there is any progress in this direction.

What Holliday said.

My view is that the more bitcoin is current in the ordinary economy - buying things such as tomatoes and land - the less volatile it shall become.

I think it will get more stable when it will be more widespread. We are a really small percentage of the global population that have bitcoins. When more people will have some, I do believe that the price will stabilize. Can't be sure tho, it's just my thought.

Bitcoin needs to be a lot more stable to be used for goods transactions. An absolute minimum is that the price shouldn't change significantly (< 0.5%)  during the minutes it takes to confirm a transaction. Otherwise, even selling incoming Bitcoins as fast as possible, a merchant takes an unacceptably large exchange risk.

Before items (other than no-cost-to-make or huge-markup items) can be priced in Bitcoins, the volatility needs to be low enough that the same price can be used for an entire day. That means volatility under 0.5%/day.

More speculators won't help.

Not sure it'll ever be below .5% simple because of the limited amount of coin available.  And I don't just mean the total coin of 12.5MM, I mean the actually float, or what is freely being traded out there in the marketplace on various exchanges around the world. 

I think eventually someone will create a working futures type of market so businesses can hedge against price fluctuations.  Think oil prices for airlines as an example.  Southwest had amazing earnings a few years back when oil went to $150 a barrel simple because they hedged better than the rest of the airlines.

Hedging has costs. You pay a commission and a spread. If you have to hedge just to cover single-day volatility, the cost will exceed that of credit card processing.

For Bitcoin to make a dent in retail sales or remittances, the same-day volatility has to come way down. There have been about 14 days in the last 60 when the BTC/USD price changed by more than $100 in a day. Bitcoin is stuck as a pure speculation as long as that continues.

Maybe this will be a problem untill all bitcoin has been mined.. Seems like the value will continue upwards trend till this happens. Ofcourse there will be major down times but in the long run it will allways recover. Bitcoin might allways be vary volatile and only used as a investment, savings and transfer of assets.  Just because it might not be used to buy your lunch or buy gas for your car wont mean the end of bitcoin. It's also hard to predict what would happen if every company and online website accepted bitcoin as payment this would change everything and maybe cause the volatility to be lots less....

High volatility and unpredictability, are the outcomes of unregulated markets, of an currency, that is very attractive to speculation.

More than half way there already. If that was going to induce stability, it would have happened by now.

+1

I should point out that in markets like ours volatility will always happen, while things will settle down you're still going to have price spikes and so on but that's just because that's what a real free market is like, people will always buy low and sell high because it benefits them, if you always bought and sold high you'd be constantly making a loss. That said as the currency spreads out and people use it more and more for buying stuff which is getting easier now things should settle down.

A prime example of something extremely manipulated are paper currencies and the long term/short term government bonds, the only reason they are at the prices they are is because someone in a central bank is pressing a button and buying them up when they think the price is too low or selling when they think it's too high.

Regular paper currency doesn't have much volatility.  But while some of it may be due to a central bank buying and selling, they don't do enough to control the daily prices.  The main reason is market cap.  Look at the market cap of the USD, Euro, etc vs. XBT?  Look at a large cap stock like GE, JNJ, versus something "new" like Telsa?  Shares outstanding and market cap.

So little out there, it's such a speculative investment at this point, which means huge price swings..  Also one of the reasons many people like it...no chance for real inflation.

Tell that to Zimbabwe.

http://nowiknow.com/wp-content/uploads/zimbabwe-100-trillion-dollar-bill-obverse.jpg

I don't consider that a real currency. ;)  Look at my examples.  USD, Euro, Yen, Yuan, and several others with huge market caps have the low volatility.  Other fringe currencies, and ones like Zimbabwe which is basically not even a currency, will have volatility just like XBT will. 

I am finding volatility to also be an issue.  Sitting on Bitcoin makes me nervous which seems to reduce its utility in some way.

After thinking about this for awile, I think that the volatility "problem" is mostly attributed to societies attitude that money should be easy.  There are many examples of "out of sight...out of mind" attitudes in our society and money is not any different.

Bitcoin forces everyone to lower themselves to speculator status to think about when they get Bitcoin and when they spend them.

I believe that if Bitcoin fails it will be because forcing people to get and spend their money wisely is non-utilitarian.

In a nutshell...too much work.

Ahahahhahh! Oh boy are you about to have your world crushed, the reason that paper money has appeared to have low volatility ( note how I said appeared ) is because central banks have come together to make sure to stop any other form of currency taking place and they deliberately fix the exchange rates to hide all the evidence of what paper money is doing to our economies. Now that Bitcoin has entered the picture it has immediately come under attack by them because like with Gold/Silver it is honestly reflecting what is happening to those markets because it has a fixed supply and certain scarcity compared to paper.

Siding with these other paper currencies just because it hasn't happened to them yet is foolish and short sighted and I'll also point out another target that fiat currencies supporters go after, haven't you ever wondered why Americans are always attacking China's currency? Sure, there's is paper too and I don't like that either but because they actually produce things in their economy and pay off debt they're making the western countries look bad.

USA is criticizing the yuan because the Chinese peg their currency to others , and don't let it float like it should be on a free market , by this encouraging their exports.
Also , I can laugh at the "things" China produces compared to your debtfull western countries.

1    China   $ 2,057,000,000,000   2012 est.
2    United States   $ 1,564,000,000,000   2012 est.
3    Germany   $ 1,460,000,000,000   2012 est.

1 billion people , helped by an under valuated currency managed to export 133% more than 80 millions germans.
Can I lol at that?

I laugh at all the countries, no need to get defensive :D Also the U.S is even worse than China when it comes messing with things which makes it very ironic when they lecture others about 'running' a free market.

Markets are not efficient, they are not stable, mostly because they aren't transparent so no one knows what to expect.

Markets tend towards monopoly-oligopoly, and indeed all crypto coins start out with oligopoly-monopoly. The monopolists tend to be able to exploit the lack of transparency a little better than most. So if the market blindly overshoots one way the consolidated power can more easily exploit that take advantage and shoot it back the other way.

Lack of transparency is, essentially, the seed of businness cycles imo.

Having the currency, or price signal itself be a market based mechanism is the horror of horrors, but then once the rediculous notion of a free-market is fully proven as impossible, maybe we could move on to a direct-democracy, internet governed economy ala Michael Albert's (the MIT physicist and economist (Amherst)) Parecon.

lol what exactly is a "real currency"?

Kinda getting off the real topic originally, but still somewhat related.  That's the real subjective question, isn't it?! :)  I can name many that are real.  The questions remains to the ones with little or no value.  Obviously you can't buy, trade or barter with "currency" from Zimbabwe.  So how is it a currency?  Currency is defined as a medium of exchange.  You can't exchange anything for Zimbabwe "currency" because basically no one will accept it!

Your example brings up an interesting point that I have tried to bring up before on these forums.

The value of a currency is simply a confidence game...nothing more...nothing less.

If a seller is confident that handing over the keys to his 2011 Ford Super Duty for some paper bits or digital bits then that is all that matters.

The seller is not thinking about all the implications of legal tender or intrinsic value.