"To the moon" is based on the idea of exponential growth in demand (caused by, for example, just a tiny fraction of annual international wholesale trade being transacted in bitcoins). Such growth would greatly outpace so-called Bitcoin "inflation", so yes, you can have "an inflationary period for decades" and at the same time go to the moon. 3600 bitcoins per day (current reward) sounds like a lot but in the grand scheme of things (i.e. the context of international capital markets) it's not. It's a rounding error.
your only problem is: you don't get an 'exponential demand' going with this inflation because people don't demand things that are this volatile.
No profit = no adoption
high volatility = no adoption
it's fail, mofos - and so are you
Who says the volatility is permanent? It's highly unlikely. Bitcoin is young, not properly understood and ridiculously illiquid. Anyone involved in the capital markets fully understands that this extreme illiquidity necessarily means massive price volatility. Fortunately, there are people who love price volatility -- and they're fast learning about Bitcoin. They trade not just the asset (bitcoins) but the volatility itself. They create financial instruments to trade the volatility. Before long the trading of the asset, the trading of its volatility, the availability of financial instruments such as derivatives and the development of regulations and legal certainty combine to greatly reduce volatility. That's how markets work. Bitcoin will be a more viable product and that's when we'll see exponential growth. It's not going to happen overnight, of course. Bitcoin has been around for six years already and yet the very first regulated Bitcoin derivative was introduced only late last year!
EDIT: Believe it or not, Bitcoin's one-year volatility from late '13 to late '14 actually halved (from 137% to 66% -- it's still huge, of course, but it's coming down).
Or maybe you're right and your post has enlightened us all and convinced us to sell. Thanks!
