Re: Bubble has burst ..... ?
"I had a look at one of the stats sites yesterday, which indexes multiple exchanges. And it looks like a transaction of 0.1 BTC can change the global market price by about 0.5%!! Sticking 1,000 transactions through in an hour, rather than the more usual couple of hundred, can move the price down by 5%."
Citation needed? Currently based on the Bitstamp order book, 5663 bitcoins would be needed to drive the price down 10%; 66 bitcoins would be needed to drive the price down 1%. This doesn't include orders that aren't on the books (people manually trading, or bots).
True, volatility is a problem for international transfers (and is why a larger market cap is a good thing), but it isn't as large an issue as you describe.
Doing international transfers with my bank is £15 for within Europe, £25 elsewhere. The zero loaded credit cards (if I even had one) presumably wouldn't help for transfers to individuals.
"So given BitCoins are a massive risk, and are crap as a way of dealing across foreign currencies, I struggle to see what the point of them is."
Risk reduces with time, and it will grow more useful as a Paypal alternative, for example. Many countries also have poor support for online bank transfers (e.g., even the US - it's nothing like what we have in the UK).