you have to look at overall averages and not the $30 to $50 spikes up and down, that doesn't mean it's crashing. I believe it will continue to increase as the difficulty rate goes up and also now that it's becoming more mainstream. I think you can still make money on the ups and downs though. People need to start using bitcoins more in their everyday lives and I believe that's what will make the price of bitcoin more stable. The bitcoin ATM Machines that are launched in Vancouver are a very good start in stabilizing bitcoin. Hope to see one soon where I live!
The launch of the bitcoin ATMs in Vancouver has caused quite a bit of discussion as of late the office (Work in payments in Canada). We even had an event a few months ago where one of the main speakers spoke specifically about BTCs to help get the general public more aware of it, how it is created, pros/cons, etc. It's quite interesting to see how mainstream it has become in the last few months, and these ATMs are the latest thing which should help create some stability in the price.
If I may jump in, I think wide acceptance of Bitcoin for day-to-day transactions in local contexts e.g. in China or India (or even across large parts of Europe or Africa) will lead to a great demand for Bitcoin. Since the currency has a limit of 21 million
BTC the logical thing to happen is that the price of 1
BTC will skyrocket and people will eventually use satoshis (100 millionths of a bitcoin) for normal trade. So as long as Bitcoin continues to grow in usage among ordinary people for buying things offline in stores and probably even for salaries and bills, the price of a Bitcoin is guaranteed to rise significantly. 300$ will be trivial at such a time.
Right now 0.01 Bitcoin is around 2$. For say 10 satoshis to be that amount to support millions of users, the full Bitcoin would have to be about 20 million US$
Of course this can take years or decades to achieve, but even with a case of 1 million users there's only 21 BTC per head maximum, which would force the price to grow exponentially for a while.