Earlier quoted context omitted.
To some extent, even stable currencies suffer from significant manipulation by governments. This is not a tinfoil hat idea, it's generally why non-corrupt central banking helps achieve social stability. But central banking is a large hammer, and so even in the US there are many uses of currency where Bitcoin shines. Also, over time no central bank has managed to avoid some form of corruption (this is concerning both…
One of the things the better fiat currencies have is stability of value. Bitcoin (at least so far) has failed rather dramatically at that. It's been mostly up so far, which makes many people willing (even eager) to accept the lack of stability, but it definitely hasn't been stable.
Very true. It's interesting to think of what you describe as a side-effect of the design decision (by Satoshi) to "bootstrap" the currency by strongly incentivizing speculative mining.