Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

what would happen if Giang corporations would start mining from tomorrow ?

Solo / Enthusiast mining would die over night, but the legitimacy of bitcoins would probably increase several fold along with potentially the value.

But if they mine just to get rid of BTC i/of using them, where is the value ?

the other bitcoins would still exist and be able to be traded.  if the "giants" don't spend the coins they generated, that would put upward pressure on the value of the old coins.

The value is a shitload of Bitcoin gets put into the community and all of a sudden the legitimacy problems with big merchants that is holding back the coin right now, will no longer be an issue, it could be the thing to not only make the coin official, but you know Google would try and regulate how fast they generate coin.

Also, they would do things by solar power or wind :)

If there will be ways to spend BTC aside from the speculative markets, I guess....

BY the way, what is your mining rate ?? How many BTC did you actually mind and how many did you buy on the market ??

Share this info with the community.

Me : 0 Mined, 22 Bought.

Bought 1 on the market.

Donated > 1

Earned 1

Have not checked browser mining stats in a bit, but I am not sure if I want to put those out with how people intend to abuse the technology.

Would have bought more if I had the cash.

Mined 6, and lost them.  Bought 20ish.

If Google (or some well-resourced TLA) wanted to kill BTC (I'm not saying they do, just if they did) and they decided to get serious then I imagine that they could do so fairly easily.

If they threw even a fraction of their computing power into mining I suspect that they could outpace the total output of the current miners and grab the lion's share of new coins for themeselves.  They could then simply sit on these (or even "destroy" them).  Some people may argue that this would increase the value of existing coins, but I don't think so.  If there were no freely-available new coins then the barrier to entry would become much higher for potential new adopters.  The outcome would be a smaller user base, and possibly also the ultimate a collapse of the system, except pehaps amongst those already holding coins.

There's also the 51% thing to consider.  Any big player with sufficient resources could conceivably disrupt or corrupt the block chain.

We definitely should not talk about this lol... This could screw everyone over when you have huge company with $$$$ up the ass start building mining rig farms.

This scenario is really unlikely. But it would be terrible for miners, great for early adopters, and awesome for BitCoin itself. Obviously, miners would be screwed because the difficulty would go through the roof. Early adopters would be thrilled because the value of a BitCoin would go up and they could consume a very high fraction of the market volume selling off their BitCoins without causing it to crash. Not only would they get absurdly rich, but they'd be *helping* BitCoins by doing it. It would be awesome for BitCoin itself because the value of coins would go up and the involvement of large companies would legitimize BitCoins further.

The only motive I could see for them doing this would be to try to kill BitCoins. But like the Goldfinger attack, this is an absurdly inefficient way to do that.

Not talking about it won't reduce the risk of it happening.

These people aren't stupid, are very likely to be aware of bitcoins, and have huge resources at their disposal.

A head-in-the-sand attitude won't help anyone.  It's better to be aware of and address these (very real) possibilities rather than brushing them under the carpet and hoping it won't happen.

[edit]
Added the quote to make it clear what i replying to
[/edit]

Not talking about problems doesn't make them disappear.

How would the barrier be higher? For the majority of people mining already isn't profitable, so they would have to "enter the economy" by exchange fiat money for bitcoins, or accepting payments/donations in bitcoin. That doesn't change if mined coins are hoarded by one player, the value just goes up.

Without commenting on the likelihood or otherwise, I don't see how it would be good for anyone.

If a Big Player™ decided to undermine bitcoins then they could do so very easily.  All they'd have to do is throw enough resources at it to capture the majority of the mining capability and they'd be able to sit on whatever they mine.  This would be likely to temporarily push up the value of existing coins, thereby making it much more difficult for any new adopters to jump in.  Then when the number of people using bitcoins contracts and the number of services accepting them in payment shrinks (both of which I think would be likely in this scenario) the value of each coin would decrease as the existing supply outpaced the demand.

And don't forget the 51% thing.  That's potentially a very big issue.  If someone could control the block chain, even partialy, then the intergity of the entire system would be compromised.

If such a player actually wanted to help bitcoins then the best thing they could do is not mine at all, but rather just start accepting them as payments.

If the value of existing coins goes up, then people don't need as many of them. So it doesn't matter that they're more difficult to get. It cancels out.

Then, when the value drops, people can get as many bitcoins as they need. So if you assume the problem occurs, it will solve itself. This tends to suggest the problem won't actually happen.

If they push up the price of bitcoins, people will need fewer of them. If they make bitcoins expensive and thereby discourage people, the reduced demand will lower the price, ending the discouragement.

That's true, but that's a different issue from them mining. At worst, they could significantly increase the time it would take before you could be assured a bitcoin transaction wasn't going to be reversed.

How does the value going up make the entry barrier any higher? A number is just a number. Regardless of whether you can get 10 or 100 bitcoins for $100, 100 dollar worth of bitcoins is 100 dollar worth of bitcoins.

I was going to Photoshop a chart with a pound of feathers and a pound of rocks but I'm too tired.

Well, I have started this discussion and I am happy to see that it is taken into consideration.

I fully agree with Missy's answers given in the discussion. Always remember that the big guys, not only have the hardware resources and the money to mine but also they have a lot of intellectual's added value of so many smart guys working for them. This means to me they are fully aware of BTC and they might even have taken it into consideration for a sort of brain storming section on the subject.

To me, BTC has a value only in the terms presented by its inventor. Quoting from the original document of Mr.Satoshi Nakamoto:

"Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network."

Therefore BTC, is merely a way to avoid double spending transactions on Internet Commerce.

I would address you to read my post about a Paradigm Shift @ http://pointapp.blogspot.com/2011/06/comment-to-bitcoin-uncensored-blog.html

Than, let's continue the discussion.

So, by extension, it's practical for the bitcoin economy to continue as it is now, with no more coins being created or introduced than are currently in circulation?


I think there's a 'perceived value' thing to be addressed.  I think that people are unlikey to be drawn in if the price of a single coin is excessively high (in fiat terms).


Yes, I agree that it's unrelated to mining, but it's a very real possibilty if someone decides to throw enough power at it.

Unless I'm misunderstanding things (which is quite possible) then it seems to me that it's also a much much bigger issue than the time it takes to confirm a transaction.  Doesn't control of the block chain enable the controller to reverse every transaction (or at least a significant proprotion of them), and also create fraudulent transcations?

Overtaking 50% of the network right now is no small endeavor.  If you look at the "total computational speed" graph here

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

you'll see that it's up to a collective 10 THash/s.  Assuming the GPU miners are the most efficient miners out there, the fastest a *single* device can hash at is 835 MHash/s (ATI 6990, according to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison).  Let's say such a GPU costs $100 apiece (maybe you get a huge volume discount because you'll be buying so many).  Taking over half the network takes another 10 THash/s of additional hashing power, or just over 10,000 new GPUs.  Already, that's costing you $1,000,000 just to buy the equipment.  The actual price of the fast GPUs is closer to $500-$1000, so a more realistic total cost is $5M.

But the network's total hashing power is going up exponentially and has been for some time, increasing tenfold roughly every three months.  There's only ~100,000 Bitcoin users out there, so there's probably quite some time left before the exponential growth tapers off.

So while it might cost Big Company X only $1M-$5M today to overturn the network, it may well cost them $100M-$500M to do the same by the end of the year (not to mention that making and installing 1,000,000 new GPUs takes some time).

It's not unthinkable yet, but it soon will be.

How many transactions he can reverse depends on how much computing power he has. The more transactions he wishes to reverse, the more he needs. (And the software can be tweaked to make it as hard as we want to reverse larger numbers of transactions without any change to the protocol.)

Control of the block chain gives you no ability to create transactions. At the very worst, you can block transactions and undo transactions. Nothing stops the recipient from redoing an undone transaction so long as a conflicting transaction hasn't been placed by the original sender.

Thanks for making that clear Joel.

Not so much with offers like this - Now tell me BTC won't buy you something.
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22870.0;topicseen

Wouldn't Big Company X need to do this covertly to avoid atrocious PR which would probably cost them far more than any gain?

I can see that most of the discussing is on technical issue whether it is possible for the big guys to mine and how much might cost them to do so. I am surprised only a few of the answers on this discussing are addressed to what the my initial provocation was all about !!

Let's try again : HOW COME THE BIG GUYS SEAMS TO HAVE NO INTEREST AT ALL IN BTC ???

It has been suggested in one of the answers that if they would find BTC economy interesting, rather than mining they would start accepting BTC as a new form of payment.

Again : why this is not happening ?? And please do not answer me that may be they are not aware of BTC yet.......

Thanks.

New World Economy !!: BASIC STUFF - PART THREE http://t.co/nNUiwTz Please Retweet this

Not so much with offers like this - Now tell me BTC won't buy you something.
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22870.0;topicseen
[/quote]

This is a clever one. Thanks for posting it !!

If a player with enough mining capacity came online, he could undermine the chain integrity, enabling himself to double-spend his btc (otherwise known as inflation, or money printing), correct?

The only reason why I don't see anyone doing that is that the only motivation to do so would be to undermine btc, since you can't buy anything of substance with btc directly.

I do not believe that enough useful GPUs exist in the world, in purchasable form, right now for any entity to take over the network.  It would require a door to door search and confiscation in at least one major western country.

If you wanted to do it with CPUs, it would take about 150,000 quad core Xeon E7450s.  But that is the top end CPU, and it certainly doesn't exist in that quantity worldwide.  Go down a tier, and you need about 300,000 of them.

For reference, google had about 150,000 CPUs back in 2007 (http://arnab.org/blog/how-many-computers-does-google-have).  They've probably grown considerably, and might have 300,000 CPUs total by now.  But they will be a mix of CPUs from the last few years, probably none were ever top of the line at time of purchase.  If you operation is massively parallel, you don't need the fastest CPUs, you need the ones that give the best bang for the buck.  And google is using whatever CPUs they have to make money hand over fist already, so it seems unlikely that they would want to shut down their search operations to take on bitcoin in a big way.

Estimates of the number of CPU cores owned by Google varies wildly.  ZDNet did an one back in 2007.  They reckoned that Google had the capacity for 654,400 processor cores (so maybe 300,000 actual CPUs).

That's in just one building.

The site in question has two such buildings.

And that's just one site out of many.

Now, how much of that is speculation, and how much of the capacity is actually filled I have absolutely no idea.  But to underestimte what Google is capable of is, I think, a dangerous thing to do.

A bigger risk is a governmental entity deciding to step in. A small fraction of the compute horsepower they have on hand to crack cryptosystems could be used to subvert the block chain, effectively destroying all credibility. They also have the incentive to prevent others from using Bitcoins as a payment system, for example they can't tax it.

On the other hand, someone wielding 51% of the compute power could control which blocks made it into the block chain, effectively blocking transaction unless a fee was paid to the appropriate party.

A bigger risk is a governmental entity deciding to step in. A small fraction of the compute horsepower they have on hand to crack cryptosystems could be used to subvert the block chain, effectively destroying all credibility. They also have the incentive to prevent others from using Bitcoins as a payment system, for example they can't tax it.
[/quote]

Government and any other big organization, will never go mining BTC.
BTC have NO value except for the speculative markets that have been created. The merchants that accept BTC as a form of payment, they do it for speculative purposes only. Cancel the speculative markets and BTC have no actual value. They would dye.

 Satoshi Nakamoto,  presenting the project, writes:


Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.



So BTC is a solution to a specific problem i.e. " .....a solution to the double-spending problem ....."

If you read my posts with ONLY this goal in mind, surely we will never understand each others. Ok, my wrong choice to post into this blog, probably. I might agree on that, or at least on what it appears to be.

In my post Bitcoin Paradigm, I stated that BTC is merely a tool that might be useful to implement the " Paradigm shift".

Obviously the Paradigm Shift to which I refer to in that post is much wider that a solution to double-spending problems that occurs in transactions. What I am suggesting is that the economy as it is today (taken in its widest meaning ) is obsolete and that we are all understanding this by noticing those that I have described as "anomalies " in the current system.
This is probably the main reason why so many people are investing so much intellectual's capital into BTC, I guess. Again, double-spending problem on transactions is just a specific anomaly of the whole system that is now being analyzed by many, thanks to BTC' s inventor. But this is only one of the many anomalies that are inherent in the present economic system.

Needless to say that it is the technology progress that allows all of us to see this specific anomaly and many others. With technology, we have reached a point where people can actually become Prime Actors in the economic system rather than being just passive. See Mr Google interview :

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Googles_view_on_the_future_of_business_An_interview_with_CEO_Eric_Schmidt_2229


I am not suggesting that Mr Schmidt has in mind what I have in mind, but clearly he is drawing a pattern where the main focus is on people using the internet ( which is nothing new to Google ). Only this time there is a difference. They want you to let them know what you want. And I am not talking about what kind of app would be most useful or staff like this. They want to know from us what we would like to buy and possibly when we would by what we want. Google, in my opinion, has simply found another anomaly in the economic system. And this one has nothing to do with transactions at all.

You are assuming the Government would only get involved in BTC because of it's perceived value. My point is:

A Government could apply the compute resources at its disposal to corrupt the process because it wants to. All it would take is some congressman from one of the stupid states to appropriate a few billion $ to stamping out them bitcoins that's being used to buy drugs, kiddie porn and weapons for terrorists.

I am not assuming that at all. I am saying that there is no need for governments to go mining; they just need to outlaw BTC.

Beside this, I am speaking of something else...

Sorry, I lol'd at this.

In the good old USofA they outlawed drugs and that hasn't worked out very well. It'd be faster and cheaper to trash the block chain.

No need to apologise :)) But again I have to say that I am speaking of something else. I am not assuming BTC would become a treat either for governments at all.

TAKEN FROM ANOTHER DISCUSSION ON THIS FORUM. NONE OF THE CONTENT IS MINE. BUT I LIKE IT ;D

"The money comes from the effort of their mining and the value in the blocks they've mined. It's the same as when someone mine's gold -- the value comes from the effort of their mining and the rarity of gold. BitCoins don't need to be backed because they're scarce. You only need to back something that's not scarce. (That's why gold itself doesn't need to be backed.)" [Quoted]


My poo is scarce.  There is a limited supply of it produced over time.  Therefore my poo is a valuable currency that need not be backed by anything. 

Realistically, Bitcoins have value not because they are scarce, but because there is demand for them. 

This demand is created because Bitcoins are cool, and you can have fun buying things with them, and playing with all the Bitcoin-related Web charts and the open source software and the crypto.

You could fork Bitcoin right now, and have your own identical system, and the coins in it would be just as rare and difficult to produce as Bitcoins are.  They would also be worthless, unless you could make them cool, and make it possible for people to have fun doing things with them.

Bitcoins, like stocks, are a "psychological market."  When stock is issued, the company gets its money from the initial sale, and no matter what happens to the stock value, the company never has to give the money back.

You can't do anything with the company, unless you have control, so for the average stock owner having less than 51%, the stock trades in its own little world, supported only by the belief that its value bears some relationship to the value of the company whose name is printed on the financial statement.

Bitcoins are like that.  Should people ever become bored with Bitcoins, or not be able to do things with them they find satisfying, like thumb their nose at the government while buying Alpaca Socks, they will quickly become worthless.

Bitcoins may be worthless some day, but TODAY is more pertinent, and TODAY you can eat with them
http://www.bitcoinclassifieds.net/Food/

it's true that the value of bitcoin (and everything else for that matter) is due to demand.  no demand = no value.

however, supply (scarcity) is no bit player.


and "poo" actually does have value, but that's over-thinking it.   :)

This idea that governments "can't tax Bitcoins" keeps coming up again and again, and I find it quite strange.  Taxes are owed regardless of the payment mechanism used.  If I work for income, I owe taxes on that income, whether it comes via a direct deposit, a check, cash or shavings of gold.  If I don't pay those taxes, I'm breaking the law: the end.  It might be easier with some mechanisms than with others for someone else to find out I'm being paid, but ultimately, it's my own personal responsibility to report and pay the taxes due on the income I've received.  And it's not like underreporting the taxes you owe doesn't lead to large inconsistencies that others can plainly see.  What's that?  You earn $1000 / year and you've just bought a million-BTC yacht?

This fantasy that Bitcoins will bring governments' to their knees as they find themselves unable to tax people is just that: a fantasy.  The following xckd (it keeps appearing in these forums) sums the essence of the flaw in this kind of thinking quite nicely: http://xkcd.com/538/.

I think that some of us are forgetting that a large company, namely one that has software (such as Google) does not even need to use its own hardware, let alone buy more high end GPUs. Google can simple bundle a custom CPU/GPU miner in all of their free software (Earth, Picasa, Desktop, Toolbar, Talk, etc) and use users' hardware to mine for them, the same way as the website JavaScript miner mentioned elsewhere on these forums. Even using as little as 15% of each user's hardware that is running a Google software, can allow them to access a huge amount of processing power.

-Mike

don't overlook how dependent governments are on inflation.  there's a good reason they were so keen on abandoning the gold standard.

however, even with a gold standard there were still taxes.  but they were so obvious, even a caveman could see them.

This reminds me of the Folding@Home project (http://folding.stanford.edu/).  It might not be a bad idea to write a miner that runs as a screensaver on your machine.  You wouldn't be mining for profit (the electricity costs more than the return), but you'd be mining to secure the blockchain.  The combined computing power of *lots* of people can add up.

Hehe, it does add up. If I were a Google Exec, I would have instructed every team for every project to code a background bitcoin miner for all free software.  And keep all the mined BTC myself...

This idea that governments "can't tax Bitcoins" keeps coming up again and again, and I find it quite strange.  Taxes are owed regardless of the payment mechanism used.  If I work for income, I owe taxes on that income, whether it comes via a direct deposit, a check, cash or shavings of gold.  If I don't pay those taxes, I'm breaking the law: the end.  It might be easier with some mechanisms than with others for someone else to find out I'm being paid, but ultimately, it's my own personal responsibility to report and pay the taxes due on the income I've received.  And it's not like underreporting the taxes you owe doesn't lead to large inconsistencies that others can plainly see.  What's that?  You earn $1000 / year and you've just bought a million-BTC yacht?

This fantasy that Bitcoins will bring governments' to their knees as they find themselves unable to tax people is just that: a fantasy.  The following xckd (it keeps appearing in these forums) sums the essence of the flaw in this kind of thinking quite nicely: http://xkcd.com/538/.
[/quote]

Agree on this.

TWO FRIENDS MEET :

-DID YOU COME WITH YOUR MOTORBIKE ?

-NO ASSHOLE, I AM WEARING A CRASH HELMET SINCE I AM A POWER RANGER !! ;D

Besides, I have never seen a company react quickly on a such a topic as for example bitcoins.
At the moment it is 'only' a geeky project with lots of people putting their spare time into. This is (not yet) something of true market value to, lets say, google.
Imagin how many people this corporation would need to involve with decisions until the intern gets his idead approved to build Google Mining Riggs ^TM.

An putting 'secret' code in their programs for distribution is a far shot aswell. Just look at other software which is suspected of doing things the user does not know of. This would be a huge image damage. Just look at M$ XP activation and how long people have been trying to find out what data is being send.

Just my humble opinion...

Agree on this.
[/quote]

You have the idea, but you're looking at it from the wrong perspective

Do you pay sales tax on all items you purchase on the internet?  I'm willing to bet not.   Why?  Because cross-state sales made it very very difficult to actually enforce collection practices.   So it's not that the liability, or the law went away - just the ability to meaningfully enforce it collection.  It turned paying sales tax on many purchases into a voluntary exercise.

Bitcoin is the same way - If you feel like your government is going to spend your contribution in a way that you approve of,  by all means! pay your taxes on all BTC transactions and purchases!  The reality is Bitcoin defaults you to opting out of that system.

And frankly, it's not even legally or ethically a problem - Remember, the world doesn't view bitcoin as a currency - If you trade someone a loaf of bread for a bag of apples, how much tax do you owe the government on that transaction?   Same situation with bitcoin, same advantage to its users.

As to whether BTC has the power to bring governments to its knees, the answer there is "??????" - Frankly this is another perspective problem too though.   Many of us have come to see that Governments all around the world are in the process of bringing themselves to their own knees under the sheer weight of debt they've taken on to stall the financial sectors systemic insolvency.  That happens whether Bitcoin was ever invented or not, so the question isn't "Can bitcoin bring them down" so much as "will bitcoin be a successor to the dollar when the dust clears"

As to whether BTC has the power to bring governments to its knees, the answer there is "??????" - Frankly this is another perspective problem too though.   Many of us have come to see that Governments all around the world are in the process of bringing themselves to their own knees under the sheer weight of debt they've taken on to stall the financial sectors systemic insolvency.  That happens whether Bitcoin was ever invented or not, so the question isn't "Can bitcoin bring them down" so much as "will bitcoin be a successor to the dollar when the dust clears"
[/quote]

You are right, BTC development has nothing to do with bringing governments down. Beter not wast time on issues like this.

Thanks.

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:]

Wait until people start building there own circuits to mine... if they have not already!

A COMMENT ON THE VENUS PROJECT

This is taken from the Venus Project at http://www.thevenusproject.com/en/a-new-social-design/resource-based-economy

"Money is only important in a society when certain resources for survival must be rationed and the people accept money as an exchange medium for the scarce resources. Money is a social convention, an agreement if you will. It is neither a natural resource nor does it represent one. It is not necessary for survival unless we have been conditioned to accept it as such."
[Quoted]


Absolutely True ! In the article the author advocates that in a Resources Based Economy, all the Earth Resources become a common heritage for all humans, this making the monetary system no more needed and thus allowing a generalized growth for all people that would experience a better ( enhanced ) life - style. In addition, he states that : " our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter productive to our survival." [Quoted]
This rationing comes from the unproper use of the available resources that must be rationed since we are wasting them.


What else could be more appropriate for our world survival ? My hat off to you, Author.


Now, Human Intellect is also a natural resource. Most of the times it is , unfortunately, rationed through money and wasted even thought Human Intellectual is not a Scarce Resource.
Could be argued that Human Intellect is not a resource for survival, but I think this is a far fetched hypothesis.


The whole thing is therefore addressed to a better use of the available resources promoting thus a MUTUAL BENEFIT for all people.


My previous post (Basic Staff - Part Three) goes exactly on the same direction.


I haven't deepened my knowledge of the Venus project to such an extend that I can see if they have a starting point for the whole project, any entry. Most probably they have and they are already operating it ( would be glad if someone points my in the right direction about this matter so that will save me a lot of time ).


My project, instead, has a very clear starting point : the world wide web and more specifically the USERS of the web. All of us.


Good Theories are always welcome, but they need to be practical and applicable, possibly in the Near Future.


As I have already said, I am working, with a very restricted team of people, on a new web based project that would involve actively the Users. The project aims, at first , to gain control of the web by the users by re balancing the economy of it. Than goes on and on......



Anyone interested in sharing some thoughts, can contact me privately at michele.intertex2000@gmail.com.

My comment given on another discussion on this forum. http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=5373.360

You Think it has nothing to do with BTC ???

aren't the large pools really just a form of company? They could also corrupt the block chain if they gained 51%.

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Facebook & Economy : The big guys "moving the other way"... Check this out !!

http://mashable.com/2011/06/29/amex-facebook/

BASIC STAFF - PART FOUR USERS A RESOURCE BASED ECONOMY

http://pointapp.blogspot.com/2011/07/basic-staff-part-four-users-as-resource.html

ANSWER GIVEN TO http://falkvinge.net/2011/07/03/bitcoins-four-drivers-part-3-merchant-trade/#comment-87785


I have followed all your articles on BTC so far. They are all very insightful and interesting. Thanks.
It still remains to solve the issue regarding what people can actually do with btc ?
At present, they can only be traded on the exchanges markets.
Even if a large number of merchants would adopt btc as a form of payment ( finding it convenient according to your article ), they still will need a way to change btc into real cash. Unless, of course, the chain does not stop here and they would be able to buy from their suppliers paying with btc, go shopping for their personal needs and pay with btc and so on….
At present, btc move from the exchange market to people who buys them. From these people could move to merchants , providing there would be enough to notice this movement which, at present , is not the case, Than from merchants btc can only move back to the exchange market.
Thus for merchants adopting btc as a form of payment , ( aside from the advantages you have illustrated in this article ) could be considered as a form of investment, a speculation if you like.
This tends to limit the number of merchants interested in btc for obvious reason.
It is my opinion that , in order to boost btc economy, the final place where btc have a real tangible value, cannot be the exchange market alone.
There is nothing wrong in trying to make some extra money in speculation, but this bounds btc potential.
For example e-commerce, would be advantaged from adopting btc as a form of payment. Once the transactions are made, we will have these e-merchants loading up with btc and while they will unload their available stock of goods. Than, what ? They have to go to the exchange market and buy back fiat money in order to fill up theirs werehosues.
If btc economy is confined into this boundaries, it is very unlikely that we would see it booming up like many are expecting.
The underling concept of btc ( being a currency that allows to avoid double spending on transactions cutting of all the middle man ) remains intact even inside the boundaries I have outlined above. Merchants would have benefit from a cost free transaction on theirs sales even if they would have to buy back real cash at the end of the game.
We need to have some alternative ways for merchants to spend their btc rather that buying back fiat money. Or , at least , a way to spend some of the btc they would accumulate. Perhaps a way that would allow them to increase their sales more and more like Advertising on the internet paying with BTC……