As I was telling Jayvan, the idea would be that early adopters use the
   currency for its inherent uses to them, as opposed to its speculative
   potential.
   Right now, bitcoin is almost exclusively speculative. It's worth a lot
   of money because the value has been increasing consistently. That's
   tulipmania.
   In a perfect world you would have some way to protect a currency
   against speculation. The volatility in bitcoin makes it less useful as
   a currency, therefore the speculation is damaging bitcoin.
   I don't have a solution, and I'm not suggesting one, I'm merely
   suggesting that a solution might exist that would be a substantial
   improvement.
   If bitcoin was based on something that had inherent value, say cloud
   storage, then a spike in value would be followed by a spike in the
   amount of storage being contributed to the network (bitcoin currently
   does this, a spike in price is followed by a spike in mining). The key
   here though is that the network would be protect from dramatic dips in
   value. When bitcoin drops in price, all of the abundant mining does
   nothing to save bitcoin, because the bitcoin mining doesn't actually
   add any value to the network. Nobody cares how many petaflops the
   network is pulling, because the petaflops can't be put to use somewhere
   else.
   But if the mining was based on cloud storage, a dramatic drop in the
   price of the currency would result in a dramatic drop in the cost of
   storing data on the network. That's something that actually has use,
   and so people would let the price fall unreasonably low (instead they
   would find a way to make use of the cheap storage). This would allow
   the currency to ride arbitrary spikes in price while being protected
   against arbitrary drops in price.
   Jim, the amount of mining being done on the bitcoin network has no
   impact on the price. The price might have an impact on the volume of
   mining, but because the mining is specific to the bitcoin network
   (double sha2 hashing or something like that) it can't be sold or used
   for other applications. Bitcoin mining is only good for bitcoin mining,
   which means the demand for the mining is exclusively based on value of
   the bitcoins being mined every day.

   On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 8:54 PM, coderman <[1]coderman@gmail.com>
   wrote:

     On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 5:43 PM, David Vorick
     <[2]david.vorick@gmail.com> wrote:
     > ... How do you prevent the early adopters from becoming stupid

   > wealthy if the currency takes off?

     high risk, high reward.
     why should early adoption with high risk not pay more than late
     adoption with significantly less risk?
     i agree that the externals affecting BTC exchange rate are volatile
     and annoying, but this hardly seems like bitcoin's fault. do you
     fight tulpenmanie with currency controls? good luck!

References

   1. mailto:coderman@gmail.com
   2. mailto:david.vorick@gmail.com