Its hard to justify its use as a transactional currency when its capital appreciation is so high. Perhaps the adjacent question is "why spend it on anything"? At the moment...this may impact the evolution of transactional infrastucture...in terms of ROI (when timing is considered).
By that logic wouldn't it best to buy everything possible through bitcoin? i.e. transfer fiat you would spend on products to bitcoin and enjoy deflationary prices
I don't think that entirely how the economics work.
If you transfer your EUR, USD, whatever to Bitcoin, it would make sense to delay any purchases to next week/month/year, because you would at this point get more value for your Bitcoins. This is bad for any retail that's not sell food or other essentials, where you can't delay the purchase.
When you see government and national bank attempt to pump out money, they are trying to do the opposite. This means that if you want to buy a new TV there's no point in waiting, you won't get a significantly better deal next month.
Bitcoins are still a bit weird, because you currently can't cash in large sums. You can't do your transactions in Bitcoin, you need a stable proxy currency for setting the value of your goods. We have maybe 8000 active products currently, all manually price in five difference currencies to maximize profit. This only works because these currencies are pretty stable and we can avoid adjusting the price for a product after a few month after initial release. It priced in Bitcoin, we would have to adjust the price of every single item multiple time a day. Of cause given the price fluctuation it would still be more profitable to simple buy Bitcoins, rather than physical goods and the later sell them... But that would be bad for employment.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Bitcoin, precisely for the reason other people like it. I believe that governments need to be able to control currencies. If you don't trust your government, then that's a different problem.
Would it be valuable to you to have a single base currency in which prices are set (i.e. with a rate derived from the composite of underlying currencies), which then automatically sets the prices in the other currencies? I ask you partially because we are developing something like that and I'm not super aware of how large e-commerce providers handle this problem.
No, not valuable at all. I thought that it would make sense to, initially.
You want to set the price in each marked separately, finding the maximum price for that product in the given market. A product you can sell for say £10 in the UK, might sell equally well for the equivalent of £12 or even £15 in Scandinavia. You could sell the item for the £10 in every country, but why miss out on the profit?
Just using an exchange rate won't take the market (competition) and purchasing power in the different countries. Also you'll end up fighting sells personal who will want to be able to set the sales price, or set them as dictated by the suppliers ( it's technically illegal in many countries, but very few are willing to fight the suppliers, so you need to support it ).
Even in the Euro countries you'll want to be able to price a product differently in each country.
Would depend on your working capital position/turnover.
At the end of the day, you want to be net-long BitCoin. Its hard to set up a systemic trade like that because its one-sided. The price of the underlying assets just becomes a distortion. That is if I am understanding you correctly.
