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A comment on Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa. Parent comment

Re:Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa by mrb on Sunday February 23, 2014 @10:35PM (#7288961)
It is extremely short-sighted to look at the volatility of Bitcoin today and say "it can never work".

Volatility IS DECREASING over time, as the economy and volume/market depth on exchanges are increasing. This has been explained many times on HN.

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Re:Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa by sanswork on Sunday February 23, 2014 @10:56PM (#7289009)
If you look at the charts volatility has actually gone up quite a bit during the past year, then levelled out a bit then spiked this past month or so but it's not really started dropping at all.
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Re:Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa by mrb on Sunday February 23, 2014 @11:03PM (#7289025)
Look harder. Over the last 4-5 years volatility has gone down. And episodes of volatility spiking up are rarer.

A linear regression on the volatility line is clearly going down:

http://btcmag.9wizards.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

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Re:Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa by sanswork on Sunday February 23, 2014 @11:10PM (#7289042)
What method of tracking volatility are you looking at because all the ones I've tried on http://bitcoincharts.com/ at the all data length show an increase in volatility.

(Tried Chaikin Volatility, Donchian Channel, ATR, and Bollinger Band)

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Re:Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa by qznc on Monday February 24, 2014 @05:21AM (#7290022)
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgTzm1g10zm2g25z...

Chaikin Volatility goes down imho. I do not really know what the others mean. Are they adjusted for volume?

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Re:Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa by sanswork on Monday February 24, 2014 @11:02AM (#7291484)
I don't think it actually goes down. Look at Jan 12 to Jan 13. Then look at Jan 13 to Jan 14. There is definitely a lot more volatility during the second period.

The others largely measure average price spread using slightly different means from each other.

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Re:Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa by XorNot on Monday February 24, 2014 @01:25AM (#7289374)
It can never work because it can only handle 7 transactions per second.
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Re:Why Bitcoin Matters for Africa by wyager on Monday February 24, 2014 @01:36AM (#7289402)
That's a removable artificial limit, not a hard one.

By tweaking some settings, the network could easily be scaled to many times that.

If it ever became an issue (read: the network started to consistently max out the TPS limit), the ceiling would be lifted. If that wasn't sufficient, effort would be put into making the network more efficient. If that wasn't enough, more creative solutions would come into play (offline transaction systems, systems built to manage BTC outside of the blockchain [see CoinKite], etc).

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