Here's what I meant in another post I made about stability ... just got this from Bitcoin.com — "The Bitcoin Jesus'" website — actually recommending not using Bitcoin for any transactions around the Seg2x fork and for a period after.
https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2017-10-09-segwit2x-safety
This really reinforces that we're still a long way off relying on any of this for actual spending while things are so chaotic, and unless spending is an actual realistic possibility in the future all these valuations will eventually come crashing down.
I'm not sure many would disagree that a load of the high prices of different coins/tokens are based how good the plan/product is for eventual mainstream crypto adoption. This is why I really think some kind of centralisation or control is a necessary evil — at least somewhere in the eco-system that can be used alongside others, even just like one coin (like *ahem* e.g. XRP) in your multi-coin wallet, that you could use to spend when crazy shit like this happens. And it will keep happening for a long while yet while all this gets ironed out.
Disclaimer: I have no personal interests in Ripple/XRP and don't even necessarily think XRP will be totally immune from the overall craziness in the crypto-sphere, but they at least have some hope of managing it, and they are just the only one I've personally seen so far that has some kind of mechanism in place to guard against this kind of thing.
I know some currencies have been designed to be deflationary, but the problem we have here is much more basic and acute: the simple fact that compared to the global market cap of fiat, this is still tiny, but people are finding out more and more every day, and unlike Forex trading, there's no need for brokers and minimum deposits, and you don't have to learn how to margin trade, you can just buy a little on the dips to just keep, and it's increasingly potentially open to the billions of people on the planet with internet connections. The potential is unbelievably huge, and with that comes the potential for unbelievably huge chaos.
One of the main ways FX traders are able to profit from trading fiat is by learning to read the charts and recognising patterns, and especially when institutional money comes in, or "whales" make their moves, and a lot of the predictability comes from the expectations and knowledge that they will make those moves in certain ways, like they always do because they have the same goals of making money in predictable ways, then responding to it.
But it's really, really difficult to get that same reliability in this space, and so far the success people have been having has been solely reliant on near-constant growth, mainly because it is still so new.
What about when some guy on the other side of the planet just happens to see something about Bitcoin on the news, or reads it online, or hears from a friend, or whatever, then gets super excited and scrapes together every penny he owns and jumps in at a totally random ATH time when nobody who's watching this every day would expect it, and then multiply that guy by the sheer numbers of people on this planet who that could potentially happen to. I mean, probably everyone on this board who might read this is/was probably the same, or at least knows someone the same, and this is really just the beginning, hardly anyone as caught on yet or figured out the learning curve when compared to the numbers of people that could, and probably will.
Predicting FX markets is already hard to predict if you aren't familiar with it, and even for people who are they are just used to the idea that losses are part of the process. I just can't see how any fully decentralised and open cryptocurrency can completely avoid this problem enough to become reliable enough for daily spending for quite some time, if at all.
It may not matter longer term, because when enough people cotton on to that the prices will probably retrace by a lot and then start to become a bit more reliable, and in that same period we'll no doubt see more and more national coins like J-Coin or the Dubai's emCash, and with more Dimons calling Bitcoin a fraud we might see the whole thing retreat and become just for traders. That might not be such a bad outcome either, as it still might give people an opportunity to get into trading and increasing their income who might never have otherwise. But it seems to me, if people within this space are a little more practical about it and realise that the existing system can't be just torched over night and replaced with a new one, then it might have more of a chance of succeeding. But at the moment this is a massive flaw, and very few people seem to be talking about it, and on the whole one of the few potential solutions seems to be getting rejected for the very reasons it's probably needed.
I could be totally wrong — and I'm not an economist. But I'd love to hear more discussion about this.