You can't design a cryptocurrency with stable value. At least not without a central monetary authority anyway. A key selling point of cryptocurrency is that i

You can't design a cryptocurrency with stable value. At least not without a central monetary authority anyway. A key selling point of cryptocurrency is that it (theoretically) exists outside of the influence of a central authority. But this very feature is the thing that will prevent it from ever having a stable value. Because there's a limited amount of it, it's deflationary in nature. If a currency becomes deflationary, then it's not going to be a currency for very long. People will hoard it instead of using it in their everyday transactions. Cryptocurrency gets most of its value from speculation. In the case of Bitcoin, at least, that speculation is spurred by some people's belief that it has importance as a potential future currency. It doesn't matter that they're wrong. Their beliefs are still enough to boost the price of the speculative asset. Then you have this cycle where its price will crash every so often. If Bitcoin's price ever stabilizes, it will be because most people have given up on it as a currency. Once the hype dies down, the question is whether it can do what gold did and become a valuable asset with a relatively steady price. Will there be fringe Bitcoin bugs like there are gold bugs who create enough demand for it to keep the price from going to zero? I guess we'll see. At its core, Bitcoin is gold. And if you want an answer to why we'll never be using Bitcoin as our currency, ask yourself why gold is never again going to be our currency. It's the same answer. Without a central authority, you can't keep the price stable. Now we could certainly construct a credit structure on top of Bitcoin. So instead of trading Bitcoin directly, we trade IOUs for Bitcoin. That's what we did with the gold standard. If they're "just as good" as Bitcoin, then it effectively increases the circulation of Bitcoin-denominated assets and can help keep prices stable. You'd of course need some kind of trusted authority to tweak various macroeconomic variables to ensure that the value of Bitcoin (or Bitcoin IOUs) remains stable. But it's possible at least for a while. You just have to give up one of the core principles of cryptocurrency. Eventually you're going to have so much money circulating and so little actual Bitcoin to back it up that the system is going to become too brittle and you'll have to leave the Bitcoin standard. Hey look. You just bootstrapped another fiat currency. Bitcoin is gold. It can be manipulated by governments just as much as gold can. And it has just as much potential to be a real currency as gold does. For a long time there, we were lucky and we were mining new gold at roughly the rate required to keep prices stable. No such luck with the cryptocurrencies. And even if you manage to hit on the right rate of currency minting today, the future looks different.