Encouraging Merchant Use of Bitcoin

[Enochian]

People using Bitcoin to purchase merchandise don't care what the price is.  They just purchase Bitcoin of value equal to what they want to buy, use it to pay for the item, and the merchant changes it back to dollars as quickly as possible.

These merchants and customers have no exposure to the long term price trends of Bitcoin.  But what scares them is the real possibility that there will be a sudden 30% price drop while someone is holding the Bitcoin.

This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it creates a narrative which discourages Bitcoin's wider adoption for transactions.

What would be the pros and cons of Bitcoin exchanges adopting circuit breakers, where trading is suspended for various periods of time on movements of the Bitcoin price by certain percentages.

If people could be certain that the price movement in a single day would be limited to, let's say, 5%, it would remove the remaining psychological impediment to using Bitcoin to buy things in everyday life.

Taking a week to drop 30% wouldn't be a big deal to speculators, but it would give merchants and store customers insurance against taking any significant loss when things are bought with Bitcoin.

Please discuss.

[LiteCoinGuy]

i can only agree. price doesnt matter for alot of things. its a medium of exchange.

[franky1]

i kind of agree. but at the same time bitcoin is still growing. its like a teenager, rebelling against authority and having growth spurts where some days it appears that it is shorter then expected, then suddenly grows overnight.

this is just like the gold run, one day a fingernail sized amount of gold dust wouldn't buy you a beer, the next month it could buy you a whole saloon, ful of beer and ladies of the night.

once more payment gateways (gold merchants) become the middle men of retail transactions, the price will settle down or atleast the gold merchants/middle men will take the risk of the volatility between customer payment and FIAT conversion.

at the moment there is a noticable trend that each 'first week' of the month there is exceptional volatility. i am wagering this to be related to the limited retailers cashing out to pay wages and restock products.

again once there is more people in the middle.. the prices wont be as freaky as most people think.

but as i said first of all, bitcoin is young, has alot to learn and is not ready to settle down. so let it have its fun and, jut be happy that it has a long life ahead.

[Frost000]

If Bitcoin were vertically integrated throughout the whole "business chain", I think it would go a long way towards having businesses think in terms of Bitcoin versus Bitcoin/dollars. As it is now, transaction prices are obviously weighed in terms Bitcoin dollar value, which discourages businesses to even deal in Bitcoins due to its high volatility.

But yes, it would definitely help if Bitcoin were more stabilized on the market with a max change of 5% per day.