After doing large amounts of nothing for months, the price of bitcoin has found a new direction at last: Down.

The recent narrative around bitcoin has been roughly zilch, as the cryptocurrency picked up a few new large vendors’ support, but otherwise settled into something approaching a summer malaise. The price of bitcoin, which is correlated to media and public interest, has bounced between around the high $500s and the low $600s for some time. Now, it has dropped to $517 and its downturn isn’t letting up.

Here’s the chart, via Blockchain:

I recently spoke to a chunk of the executive team over at BitPay, who indicated that price stability has been something that merchants find encouraging in bitcoin. That’s to say that the more stable bitcoin’s price is, the more palatable it is to merchants as a potential payment option, even for companies that intend to instantly convert bitcoin sales to traditional currency.

Why? Mostly that if bitcoin’s price is stable, it implies that the digital currency is either maturing, or has become mature, thus diminishing the chance of it going away, likely making it more worthy of supporting.

As a decent Reddit post indicated recently, the current price decline could be about as random as earlier spikes. But it is noteworthy as new momentum is always an interesting substance.