[rothbardrand]

Not in the least. Bitcoin has many uses, and is a fundamentally new technology. Naturally it's going thru the technology adoption life cycle and every few months/years it catches up to the wider levels of adoption and more mature use cases.

It will become a currency when most of it has been mined and it's in widespread use and there aren't billions of people who have never heard of it... the price will stabilize then.

It's an error to think that the only use of bitcoin is as a currency. (in the traditional sense)

[mrep]

> Bitcoin has many uses, and is a fundamentally new technology. Naturally it's going thru the technology adoption life cycle and every few months/years it catches up to the wider levels of adoption and more mature use cases.

I have literally only seen one use case where it makes more sense to use bitcoin than to use traditional currency exchanges and that is illegal markets.

The downsides (hard to use, one way transactions, high transfer costs due to low block size, super easy to get hacked and lose all your money...) all massively decrease it's value over traditional currencies. Illegal markets only put up with all of those downsides because companies/governments have specifically made it harder for illegal transactions to take place over traditional currencies.

[andirk]

If you are buying something online internationally and there is an exchange rate tax, use Bitcoin. It's rare, but it happens. And it probably will more and more. Look at BitPay. It's pretty straight forward for a retailer if they want to be Kool.