It’s not simply just to “encourage adoption”. The market must generally accept BitCoins solely based on properties other than A, then property A may allow it to become superior than other currencies currently available on the marketplace.
No, this logic is perfectly sound. Speculators will bite if they rationally calculate that they will win in the end. However, they usually engage in the speculation only on one condition: That they have information that the seller of the asset does not have, that will lead the speculator to believe that the they will profit from making the bet. Note that this is much different than a gambler, as the gambler places his money down in the hopes that he’ll win, but it’s guaranteed that the house is against him.
If you would like to test this theory, do the following: go advertise a deal to someone where if someone buys a pair of earrings from you, then they get a ticket. If enough people buy earrings from you, you agree to give them $10,000 towards buying a new car. Note that you don’t tell people how much “enough” is. Now you’ll get some people interested in the earrings themselves for various reasons, you’ll get some people who buy them like a lottery ticket, but I’ll be willing to speculate that you’ll never get rational market speculators to buy your earrings merely for the hope of getting that $10k. Unfortunately, after a while and quite a few people are on, your market participants get tired that the promised $10k ever materialises, and so they discard their tickets. Eventually, the only people left will be the few holdouts who believe that if only they could get the erarings sales back going, everyone would be rewarded a nice $10,000 reward. In fact, some people would come to think you were a scam artist, trying to sell something that could never be attainable.
This is the same problem for BitCoin: Speculators can’t engage properly in this trade because they have no way of calculating how many market participants would be required to pay them off. So you’re left with a bunch of curious techies and some gamblers. But you’ll never get what you really want. And even if you could calulate the probability, you may not like the exchange price that it would take to get a speculator interested.
And at this point you’ve fallen totally off the wagon. People don’t work or excerise as speculation of a greater future outcome. Every single worker that I know does so because they have a contractual agreement with their employer to be compensated for the work that they do. This is acting with near certainty of reward. Same goes for exercise. People who exercise do so because they can be nearly certain that they will obtain benefits.
Also, in almost all speculative ventures that one comes across, they only need 1 additional market particpant to agree for the speculation to be profitable: even gamblers only need 1 house to lose for you to win. Normal market speculators only need one person to accept the trade at the target price for the speculation to pay off. This goes for both oil futures and baseball cards. Your acceptance scenario requires that an enoumous and undefined number of market participants also engage in this speculative play with you, which is an extraordinarily difficult task. One that, had I had the education in math and probability theory, I could likely say is astronomically improbable.
I tend not to participate in things with astronomical odds. 