Bitcoin Forum

Think positively ;)

In 2014, BTC is a high end investment vehicle, only those qualified sophisticated investors with deep technology pocket (Asic factories) can touch it, normal people will never understand it, just like most of the people do not understand how MBS and CDS could be bought by banks and funds all over the world and eventually crash the world's economy

MBS and CDS crashed because of over production of house. But BTC does not have such weakness, so it can outperform those complicated financial instruments and gain more popularity

I think the wall street will be the first place that mass adapt BTC. If BTC start to be accepted as a new saving medium, there will be continuously inflow from fiat currency to this medium, the price will rise steadily, give it more popularity in investment world

Today, people's saving in fiat currency have a big problem: There is no investment opportunity, the central bank push the rate to near zero and stimulate investment, thus hurt those saving accounts. But with BTC, there is no such problem, BTC's value will not be affected by central banks, it's a saving heaven. And this in turn give central banks more room to stimulate the economy without worring about inflation and negative impact on people's pension

Correct me if this scenario have some fatal flaw...

I think gold also act similar to BTC, but now when people put lot's of savings into gold, the gold price just keep flat, due to the production has increased a lot

Frankly, I await Giga-networking and superfast SSD's before thinking about Bitcoin taking off. Just started an official client that needed catchin' up (like 100 days). Result: PC freezed and HDD is fighting for its life.

No ordinary user would ever touch Bitcoin this way and I cannot recommend it to my mom  ::)

Ultimately, I think the Bitcoin will require more time before taking off.

Just like MBS or CDS, in future, normal people will not be able to touch BTC at all, it will be take cared by institutions

All they get is a secured pension or saving account that they can withdraw fiat money with a debit card, they might not even know that their retirement money is invested in an instrument called Bitcoin

There is a concept need to change before this happens: Investors must judge the value by supply and demand, not utility

Currently the pension funds only invest in top grade securites, those securites' value are backed by a government which have ability to tax the labour of its people to pay back these bonds. From utility point of view, BTC are not backed by any such kind of utility, thus the value is mostly decided by exchange, if everyone decided to dump it, the value of BTC can go very low and you could not buy anything without a huge amount of coins

Thankfully, these are not fundamental problems with Bitcoin, only incidental current ones. The core developers are addressing the performance concerns and the initial blockchain seeding, and there are several alternative clients (http://bitcoin.org/clients.html) that are lighterweight, don't suffer from a prohibitive first-time sync, and are perhaps in general more suitable for average end-users.

Further, in a world where 200+ million people are already familiar with using PayPal, directly comparable Bitcoin web wallets such as Coinbase (https://coinbase.com/) may be the best way to go about introducing non-techies to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

100 days? Are you using version 0.2 on a netbook?

I think he meant 100 days of catching up, not that it took 100 days to finally catch up.

There's a hosted blockchain at blockchain.info and you can have your wallet on your client side but the blockchain on their server. You can not really wish for a simpler (and secure, contrary to coinbase) solution than https://blockchain.info/wallet/new . So no, you don't need SSD, only on your mining machines.