Sure they are. BitPay reports 2 million dollars in sale this month. The rate of transaction is accelerating too.
What you meant is "they will horde more and spend less on goods / services", but sales and transactions are clearly accelerating. How do you account for this?
The US GDP is about $15 trillion, so about $1.25 trillion in transactions happen in a month. If you take M2 of about $10 trillion as the US money supply, about 12.5% of the US money supply turns over each month and 87.5% is being hoarded. If you take M1 of about $2 trillion as the money supply, about 62.5% of the US money supply is used in a transaction each month, with only 37.5% being hoarded.
Compared to 62.5% or even 12.5%, 0.2% seems pretty unhealthy.
It's entirely possible that 99% of the value of a bitcoin is a self-reinforcing set of asset-bubble expectations, but this is something that really didn't exist before, that we don't have great paradigms to explain, that is undergoing massive daily shifts in its usage. It is explicitly not a stable national floating fiat currency with people who circulate the money their banking system provides & pay their taxes in those notes & denominate their salaries and grocery bills in sticky quantities of those notes, and so it's not directly comparable.
I don't have to. The fact is, no one prices their goods in BTC. Its absolutely ludicrous to price goods in BTC in the current market.
I think BTC has utility as a currency for exchange however. But on that side, you don't want to be in the position of hoarding BTC. You hoard dollars, and then use BTC to transfer dollars between people. Services like Bitpay allow you to keep most of your money in hard cash.
That's not true, BTC has many benefits to bitcoin users. There's plenty of bitcoin-only services, but more importantly, it provides freedom for many people who are facing government regulation. In the long run, bitcoin enables all kinds of innovation (good example is reddit's bitcointip service, which wouldn't really exist without bitcoins).
1BTC used to be a decent tip at $5. Today that is a $100 tip I'm giving someone. Anyone who gave money to Bitcointip is suffering from the volatility in the marketplace.
A true BTC enthusiast will be happy when BTC stops moving. It doesn't matter what value BTC has, as long as it is constant. Only hoarders want BTC to keep going up and up in value.
That'll never happen, bitcoin is doomed by math and economics to be forever a deflationary currency, worth ever more and more over time as the economy grows while the supply of bitcoins doesn't.
It really doesn't matter if a currency is inflating or deflating. It just shouldn't change that much over time. The less it changes, the better. (or, if it is changing, then it should at least change consistently. IE: People expect USD to inflate at 3% so it should).
Since no one can predict the value of BTC next week, or hell... even tomorrow's price of BTC... it becomes a very hard to use currency.
Anyone who buys with bitcoin can replace their bitcoin with dollars, if they want to stay invested in bitcoin.
IE: Deflationary Spiral. It becomes hard to be a merchant who accepts bitcoins, because everyone expects BTC to keep rising in prices.
People who bought a domain name for 1 BTC a few weeks ago from Namecheap lost a lot of money. They should have instead "saved" that BTC. Therefore, people are discouraged from using BTC as a transaction vehicle.
Currently, hoarders are the ones benefiting from BTC, but no one else is. No merchant knows how to value their services in BTC, not when there is this much volatility around.