jnbiche, it's not letting me reply to you so I'm doing it here.
You make a good point, and my above explanation was a bit confused.
I think BTC faces both problems:
There's high volatility, driven by the current level of speculation and the fixed quantity of Bitcoins that exist on the market. This makes Bitcoin a fairly poor medium of exchange since it is unlikely to hold a stable value from one day to the next.
There's also (I suspect) poor liquidity, driven by the low number of people involved in the exchanges (compared to other assets and currencies). While it may be easy to exchange Bitcoin from a process standpoint, you may not be able to get a price sufficiently close to the last quoted price when you go to exchange for dollars. It may be more liquid than a house, but it is much less liquid than USD, EUR, GBP, etc.
Unless you're an investment banker, yes. There are multiple exchanges that handle daily volume in the 10's of millions USD, with order books deep enough that you could cash out millions of dollars worth of bitcoin without moving the price more than a few percent.
That's nothing compared to what Wall St or the city is used to, but it is plenty enough liquidity for all but the most well off individuals, and growing. When the Winklevoss twins get their bitcoin ETF to IPO, I expect these numbers to increase by orders of magnitude.
Also, none of that is counting the significant volume of transactions which occur non-public or off-exchange.
You're absolute (and obviously) correct about Bitcoin's volatility, but you're mistaken about its liquidity.
Bitcoin is quite liquid if you're in the U.S. and many other countries around the world. The only delay is the time required by the legacy banking system to wire or ACH funds in/out of your exchange account.
Interesting. I did some digging and have a few follow ups:
1) Bid Ask spreads vary by exchange and currency, but it seems that with the exception of BT China an MtGox, the bid ask spreads can be quite wide. Prices for BTC/USD also very a good bit by exchange, meaning the price a merchant sets might be influenced by which exchange they use.
2) The MtGox live chart seems to imply that an order of a few bitcoins (or a few thousand dollars) could have a profound impact on the actual price of BTC/USD. This does not seem particularly liquid to me, unless I misunderstand the chart.
Well, your liquidity assumption is quite accurate in comparison to other currencies such as USD/EUR/GBP. For example on the mtgox exchange there seems to be only about 30 million US worth of volume per day which is quite low.
US/EUR seems to commonly be around 100 billion or so a day.
You make a good point, and my above explanation was a bit confused.
I think BTC faces both problems:
There's high volatility, driven by the current level of speculation and the fixed quantity of Bitcoins that exist on the market. This makes Bitcoin a fairly poor medium of exchange since it is unlikely to hold a stable value from one day to the next.
There's also (I suspect) poor liquidity, driven by the low number of people involved in the exchanges (compared to other assets and currencies). While it may be easy to exchange Bitcoin from a process standpoint, you may not be able to get a price sufficiently close to the last quoted price when you go to exchange for dollars. It may be more liquid than a house, but it is much less liquid than USD, EUR, GBP, etc.
Is my liquidity assumption mistaken?