Bitcoin Forum

After almost three years in the Bitcoin community, I think it's time to step back and take a look at the state of the real Bitcoin economy.  We all know that, ever since Laszlo bought his pizzas, Bitcoin has had difficulties breaking into the mainstream among physical merchants.  Hundreds of businesses have been attempted, selling everything from wireless phone minutes to wedding cakes.  Few have survived.  Even fewer have really taken hold.

So what are the major bellwethers for the Bitcoin economy today, and what kind of prospects do they face?  Here are a few:

Bitmit -- Slow growth
Bitcoin Store -- Not meeting goals
BitPay Merchants -- Stagnation

On the internet, growth is there, but slow.  No major e-commerce site (besides Wordpress) has adopted Bitcoin.  Adoption among smaller sites is fickle, at best.  Today, you might see the odd Bitcoin offer on Craigslist, and if you look you can find a VPN provider or web host that accepts Bitcoin.  But no Amazon, no eBay, not even Alibaba or Overstock.com support.

The state of physical transactions is even worse.  There is at least an iPhone app now.  That's a step forward.  But still no practical physical Bitcoins, or other good method of reaching the billions of people without smart phones and internet access.  No major retail acceptance.  Not even the odd local community or farmers market.

Is there anywhere that Bitcoin is succeeding, among real-life physical merchants?  Well, perhaps in two places: for buying beer in Germany, and for buying electronics in China.  It's yet to be seen how long these will last.

Even in Argentina, which is arguably the perfect location for Bitcoin adoption, having both the infrastructure to support Bitcoin and the horrible national currency and regulatory environment to motivate its adoption, Bitcoin is still seen mostly as an investment, a hedge against inflation, rather than a practical currency.

So what does all of this tell us?  It tells us that while Bitcoin may be a great investment, it's not a great payment mechanism, even on the internet.  It tells us that Bitcoin early adopters are not very interested in spending.  It tells us that industries in regions with stiff competition will branch out to accept Bitcoin in order to gain competitive advantage.  But, mostly, it tells us that we really must re-consider the prospects for Bitcoin in the long term, if we have such difficulty making it work as a practical currency right now, with such a huge head-start.

Even with the difficulties of Dwolla and Liberty Reserve, Bitcoin is not picking up the slack.  Relative unknowns like PerfectMoney and Payza are.  Tough competititors like Ripple and Square are making gains.

The strategy of focusing on remittance payments has borne little fruit, for obvious reasons.  What is a poor family in a third world supposed to do with Bitcoins, if they don't even have internet access?  How is an immigrant worker in the developed world supposed to get Bitcoins to send, without incurring huge exchange fees, or losses due to volatility?

So, what do you guys think is the way forward?  Now that we have ASICs, and Bitcoin is technically secure against all but the most capable threats, how will the real Bitcoin economy grow to capitalize on this investment?  Or do you still think that Bitcoin can survive as an investment only and, if so, for how much longer?

Reserved.

And buying coffee in China.  ;) There's a few upscale coffeeshops taking Bitcoin as a form of payment since earlier this year. There is still growth, and that's increasing at a fairly rapid speed.

Internet services such as VPN's and VPS's are already functioning well as are DNS websites and hardware websites.

The adoption may be slow but it is not dying and as long as people are prepared to keep at it I think it will survive.

Thats my fear. If it only survives off speculation about profits that can be made via exchange for USD then it'll become more and more useless as a currency.

I think it'll be just shoulders for the next thing that might achieve what btc failing too.
I think now people judge btc success on its value vs USD, rather then its adoption as a genuine currency....which is sad.

I am new to Bitcoin so I feel uniquely qualified to add my 02uBTC.
Until the use of Bitcoin is as fast and easy as something like Paypal, it cannot catch on with 'regular' people.  Right now it is just too confusing, difficult and slow.

Can't agree with that - I pay for my VPS using Bitcoin - takes only seconds and is easier than any other way I've ever done a payment over the internet (and costs me no intermediate fees).

Hi,

good issue, I thought about it too ...

I think the problem for business, physical merchands, is not the technic. Technically BTC is great, if you get it, it's impossible easy. Problem is volatility - who would accept BTC in these days, when the price is sinking or nobody knows where it will be in the next 30 days? I think, BTC-price has to calm down for some month, at best, slowly but cointually rising, so the merchands smell profit if they accept it.

Two nights ago I had an idee. What would happen, if world of warcraft and all these other big online games accept BTC or, better, Satoshis? Think about it. WoW buys 1 BTC, which are 100.000.000 Satoshis. They could spread them in the world. Gamers could gather Satoshis with their Avatar in WoW, export them to their wallet, import them in another game and so on ... would this be legal? I think, for gamers this would be a great advantage, and the game-providers could profit with little transaction fees ...

The thing is: If you count in Satoshis, they are always cheap, no matter what's the prize for a btc. And players would use Satoshis without regard to the prize. If they could change them to fiat, nice, if not, they could change them into some icon ... so, this would be what I think BTC needs - its own economy.

I know this is just going to make me sound like I'm just placing blame and dodging the real issue but I think a lot of the slow adoption etc. is due to the government sponsored attacks not at Bitcoins network because I'm not tinfoil hat wearer because I'm talking about attacks against the actual philosophy behind Bitcoin. Neo-Keynesians HATE Bitcoin since it's a living example against everything they stand for, even when they come on here trying to act polite and diplomatic they basically just ooze passive aggression and they'll make up outright lies which certainly haven't helped with spreading Bitcoin to mainstream businesses. What certainly doesn't help as well are the twats who go around freezing the accounts of Bitcoin merchants, maybe we do need to get more pure Bitcoin companies up and running for sure because our governments certainly aren't going to be nice about all of this.

Eh, maybe it's Summer but I've been a bit pessimistic lately when I see people being so openly attacked for associating with Bitcoin but I guess we should've known this type of thing would happen, as has been said there has been some real growth in some areas, I've noticed web hosts and VPNs all over the place taking Bitcoins too but when it comes to physical goods however not much is going on at least in a properly organised capacity.

How long did it take you to figure out that you could do that?
How long/confusing was it to fund your wallet?
How much research did it take for you to find/configure your wallet?
How long would it take for you to explain all of this to grandma, and Suzy in accounting? And would they be able to have it all setup, and be buying things in 10 minutes.. Like with PayPal?

first up, good thread, this is exactly the discussion the btc community has to have ...

ok, in terms of an investment, btc has already done very well, but there are several things we need to observe closely if we are to find ways of continuing to increase the btc/fiat prices for the benefit of investors, early and new alike

if we agree that most investors view btc as a safe haven, a hedge against inflation or currency collapse, then we need to look at what the alternative instruments are doing, i think btc has a problem with the spot price of gold and silver continuing to fall, investors are thinking, gold and silver are time-tested, btc is 4 years old, gold and silver are getting cheaper the more i wait, so im going to keep waiting for bargain prices of gold and silver, and forget about buying btc, which may be waaay overvalued, my point is that when gold and silver reach their bottoms, and begin to rally again, especially if this is combined with another big correction in the usd, then it wont take long before those metals are getting too expensive, or too expensive for investors to want to buy, and they'll decide theyve missed their chance, and then they;ll look around at alternative, and eye btc

we also need to identify what "caused" the rise in btc/fiat price from mid-2012 to the boom in feb/mar 2013, to the bubble and crash in april, we need to try and determine some common factors of what drove that bull market, and see if it can be replicated

but apart from this, i really think the key is the falling PM prices atm, i think btc will start climbing after that, because gold and silver bugs who miss the u-turn wont want to miss the next best thing, btc

in terms of transacting, i think btc community needs to try hard to get btc to the poorer peoples of the world, the volatility of btc is settling, and when it begins to rally next time i expect it to be steadier, with stronger trends, rally/small correction/rally/small correction etc, a zig zag path, upwards

i agree, btc needs to get away from silicon valley vc and become more "international", plus the "masses" the mums and dads out there, will have one main question, "what can i buy with it?" and so the btc economy has to be able to supply the everyday products the mums and dads buy   

Gambling is a big market for bitcoin, but it is too difficult for non-techies to set up without a big incentive.  Something like gambling gives incentives to a large group of motivated people to use it.  Silkroad too for some, but there are few other killer apps out there yet.  No VisiCalc for the Apple ][ and PC.

My list:
1. Silkroad type
2. Gambling
3. a. Wealth preservation
 3. b. appreciation, we hope
4. Easy transactions between jurisdictions, yes, but only limited need so far
5. Namecoin for the .bit TLD maybe. Needs special configuration
6. Speculation


Once it is easy to use so that your aunt or grandmother can use it easily, that will increase adoption. The audience here is not the huge sweet-spot market that would hit a large percentage of the population.

I think the single largest barrier to entry in terms of mainstream adoption is the conversion of fiat to BTC.  Volatility is a concern as well but if you are able to quickly convert and transfer, it isn't as much an issue.  The average person is not going to wait 5 business days on Coinbase (and taking on all the volatility while you wait) or pay $40 for a wire to an exchange.  You can use a service like BitInstant but then one of the main advantages of Bitcoin (low transaction fees) goes out the window.  The problem is that with other payment methods, such as credit cards, the fee is assessed to the merchant.  Bitcoin flips this to an extent in that the fee is now on the consumer.  This is a difficult transition for many people to make.  It doesn't matter if the merchant fee is baked into the price, the average consumer doesn't realize this so it's a moot point.

The one way to boost adoption is for the merchants to realize that they are paying lower fees and pass that discount on to the consumer.  A consumer needs perks to make a change especially if they're going to take on the initial inconvenience.  I don't think the advancement that Bitcoin has made over the last few years should be trivialized, as there has been substantial improvement, the main issue is that we as the early adopters do not become content with the improvement and fall into a stagnation.  We need to constantly push the envelope.  The challenge is finding a happy medium that gives incentive to both merchant and consumer to choose Bitcoin over other readily available payment methods. 

Make it easy so anyone can use it (as I mentioned earlier)..
Get the porn industry to adopt it...

There are ways to fast convert fiat to btc via paypal or credit card, see here: http://gamblingbitcoins.blogspot.ro/2013/06/how-to-buy-bitcoins-with-creditdebit.html. The problem are the fees which are still high.

The success of Bitcoin comes from the Silk Road.

Here's the state of bitcoin from my point of view.
I am hopefully optimistic.

I don't remember when I first heard of bitcoin, but it was several years ago. At the time I dismissed it as a specialized currency for gamers, a means by which they could trade stuff within their own specialized circle.

I had pretty much forgotten about it, until an issue of Internet censorship came up. Many BDSM web sites are forced to filter their content. Not because they were violating US obscenity laws, but because the payment processing companies forced them to. Payment processing companies are scared of being named an accessory in distribution of obscene content but they don't want to have to hire staff to evaluate each web site they process payments for. So instead they have a word blacklist, and they scan your content for words on that list, and threaten to cut you off if too many are there. Words like forced and dead and hypnotized - and it doesn't matter the context.

So what we end up with is limits to free speech that are far more draconian than the government could get away with, but because the processing companies are private and not government, it is not a constitutional rights violation.

In a discussion about that, bitcoin came up as a solution. That was couple months ago. The more I looked at bitcoin, the more I saw it as a solution for so many other things.

Back in the early 80s, most people used credit cards when they needed to finance something. Grocery stores, fast food places, pet stores, a lot of them didn't even have credit card processing equipment. You used credit cards for expensive purchases you needed to finance and you used your checking account for day to day living.

That started to change towards the end of 80s, more and more places started getting the equipment needed to process credit cards and by the time the Internet really took off, the general population had been re-trained to do a lot of their shopping with credit cards and then pay their credit card bill once a month.

But for purchases that you do not need to finance, giving away the kind of information you give away with your credit card number is insecure. If I buy a couple books and I don't need to finance the purchase, the only information the seller needs to have is what address to ship them too. The Credit Card system is the wrong system to use for purchases that are not being financed. Bitcoin is a much better system to use for purchases that are not being financed because with bitcoin, the vendor does not financial information about me that may be of value to a computer hacker.

There are other reasons why bitcoin has advantages over the current financial systems. One of my neighbors went through a really tough spot. He lost his job and was unable to find another for some time. He bounced some checks. He says what happened was he thought he had them covered but a payment to him never came through, I don't know if that is true, but he could not get a checking account.

He finally got a savings account that he can use with a debit card, but it can not be used as a MC/Visa so even though he is working now again, he can't buy stuff on-line yet. But he could use bitcoin and make purchases with bitcoin, so it is of value to merchants to accept bitcoin. There are a lot of people they can't sell to simply because there is not a means for the transaction to take place. Bitcoin provides that means.

The problem with bitcoin at least in the United States is that it is too difficult to aquire due to the MSB laws that differ from state to state to state.

It is my hope that at some point, places like Western Union will wake up and realize they can make a fortune as a local place with all the necessary permits that can sell bitcoin. I also hope that laws are adjusted.

In some respects, I see the use of bitcoin as an expression of free speech against a banking system that is broken, and I would like to see that first amendment aspect brought up in court challenging some of the current laws here in the US that make it difficult to work with bitcoin.

So for state of bitcoin, I think it has a really bright future and is the right solution to a lot of problems, especially for purchases that don't need to be financed, but we need (at least in the U.S.) to focus on more legal options for obtaining the currency. That's what is holding it back.

I have the following issues with the idea of BTC retail transactions:

1. Confirmation Time: It takes @ 10 minutes to get the first confirmation that a transaction has been processed. How does that compare to a credit card swipe? Win for the existing system.
2. Price Volatility: The volatility is enormous relative to day to day transaction costs -- how would you like your paycheck to vary by 10% from day to day.   Win for the existing system.
3. Wallet Security: Finding a secure wallet is not easy. Concepts such as hot and cold wallets don't inspire confidence. Why bother when I can just swipe or pay cash? Win for the existing system.
4. Regulatory Risk: Certainly an issue for fiat/crypto exchanges which may or may not apply to merchants in the long run.
5. Payment Risk: No recourse if you send payment to the wrong address
6. Public Key Length: No one can deal with the length of those keys, it's either an alias or the QR code. QR codes aren't really familiar to most people. Establishing alias's takes time and a little bit of sophistication.

It doesn't take more than one of these issues to turn 99% of people off. Until these basic problems are solved, I'm not surprised that the Bitcoin economy hasn't grown as rapidly as some would hope.

Where is the upside case?

1. Safe Haven: No way with all the volatility.
2. Transaction fees: Unclear when you add in the cost of converting to and from fiat. In any event, any savings are small potatoes, yes?
3. Time Savings: For domestic transactions, no. For international transactions, there is a real time saving in getting funds anywhere. However, once they're "there" they still need to be converted back to fiat to be of any real use.

On balance, I think it's amazing that BTC has come as far as it has given the above...

the problem is simple and the OP pointed it out perfectly.

even after 3 years he only knows of 3 main places that sell legitimate products for bitcoins. although i know that there are over 10,000. no one truly knows them all..

the solution: a proper 'yellow pages' for bitcoin merchants. once EVERYONE can see there are thousands of merchants, then it will be far easier for everyone to quote a few names to their own local merchants to say, "come on join the revolution".

to further prove the point


i can probably count under 100 gambling 'merchants' for bitcoin. but take foodler for instance. thats many thousand food establishments across america that can deliver locally via bitcoins. so technically food should be the big market for bitcoin.

but not everyone realises that all of these businesses exist

If gold can still survive, be valuable and be considered a viable investment vehicle purely on it's potential as a store of value, I don't see why Bitcoin can't.

This is also where I think those slamming on the possibility of there being alternate cryptocurrencies are off-track. Bitcoin isn't perfect. It CAN'T be. No system can fulfill every possible benefit that everyone could want. Bitcoin fulfills a niche, but let's face it: the 10-minute confirmation time alone means it's NEVER going to be directly used as a mainstream vehicle for in-person purchases.

That said, workarounds to the flaws are already coming about. Other cryptocurrencies are being tested, developed, and explored. Systems integrating Bitcoin (like Gyft cards) are starting to break onto the scene. Systems layered on top of Bitcoin will emerge eventually. It's only been 4 years, and I can already store and spend my bitcoins in ways the inventor probably never thought of. I can send hundreds of thousands buying electronic equipment, or get a gift card to buy fast food at Burger King... probably while I wait in line, no less.

I'm not worried about the state of the Bitcoin economy at all.

That's really only an issue for point of sales. Anything that ships, there will be plenty of time for confirmation. Low value stuff like mp3 downloads, the amount of double spend fraud will be really low.

And there is a solution, green address - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Green_address


True, but you can adjust prices of goods to the 7-day weighted average, there are free API's already for getting this info.


Actually wallet security I think is a strength for bitcoin, software wallets on a device. Web-wallets I don't have a lot of confidence in.


This is the problem making it hard to obtain bitcoin in the United States and needs to be rectified.


Sending to the wrong address is really difficult to do because of the checksum that is part of the address. It is highly unlikely that a typo in entering the address will result in a valid address.

The vendor simply provides a URI that can be clicked or QR-scanned and typo isn't even an issue.


Vendors just need to provide a URI. The specification has existed for some time, and I believe virtually all wallets work with it.


The main one is the regulatory issue making it difficult to obtain bitcoins. In my opinion.

more and more I am thinking that the most likely consumer end usage of bitcoin will be in micropayments. for example; you are reading an online magazine and they want to charge you 25 cents to read a whole article. bitcoin fits this need very well. there are several groups and emerging services following this idea, but it will be a few years before we see a mass adoption.

What about some kind of dedicated working group trying to push for adoption in key areas.  Maybe seven or eight coud be idendified (eg International Business Payment Settlement, Non US payments) etc.  Each group could try to raise awareness in an area...

Paypal! That gave me a good laugh.

If you login to your Paypal account through a VPN, you account is AUTOMATICALLY locked for 24 hours +. Every time.

Paypal doesn't have 2 factor authentication, and they can and do freeze your account at any time for arbitrary reasons.

Paypal isn't the standard of excellence, they serve as an example of how NOT to run a payment system.

Don't get me wrong Mr Froggy.. I hate paypal.. Paypal tried to screw me out of $5k a few years back and only gave it back after threats of legal action.. I now refuse to use paypal.
My reference was "fast and easy as something like Paypal" - as in, fast and easy for grandma to setup and start using..  Read it again and you may notice that nobody said anything about a standard of exellence or how to run a payment system.. Not sure where you dreamt that up from.. But.. Yah..

I personally like this idea a lot and others that I've read similar to it in the past.  This is an excellent way to for BTC through the proverbial door.  Thanks westkybitcoins for sparking a interesting conversation that has been on my mind and clearly we're not alone.

Bitcoin economy? Who cares? Bitcoin has its backstop as a medium of exchange because it is popular for certain types of transactions that would otherwise be impractical. It only needs a small backstop. With that, it comes into its own as a store of value. Volatility is more than made up for by massive, consistent yearly gains. It is a superhero store of value, because it is immune to scrutiny and control by third parties, like no other asset out there.

It isn't written in the stars that Bitcoin's first best use will be as a medium of exchange. That is something people have projected onto it due to their preconceptions. The Bitcoin doesn't care. It's its own thing. Network effects and inertia are a huge botteneck to rapid adoption in most types of commerce for now anyway.

It's as if people are stuck in the old paradigm, where the original vexing problem was how to get people to value bitcoins at all. Lazlo and some others solved that problem, then SR and some others provided permanent deep backing - not gigantic but deep enough that "you can always eventually find someone who needs bitcoins."

Let's stop living in the past with the vestigial obsession with commerce driven by the lurking fear that maybe bitcoins aren't really going to be valued. We're past that. More commerce helps, everything helps, but we're past the point where Bitcoin's utility as a store of value was dependent on getting trade for actual goods and services kickstarted.

This dependence mindset needs to die. It is a relic of problems that Bitcoin hasn't had for years. Bitcoin has arrived. It's here to stay, barring major technical catastrophe or obsolescence due to something better (and the latter is no cause for concern, since we'll all have plenty of advance warning because anything new needs time to develop reputation and infrastructure). The actual use of Bitcoin for trade is never going to die out, even if it remains small for a while. It's too useful as a store of value, and that utility will inevitably drive it into more people's hands, driving up the price, stabilizing the price with larger volume, boosting mining incentive to make the system more secure, and increasing development and infrastructural investment in a virtuous cycle. When more people have it and the price is stabler and the infrastructure sounder and the apps more user-friendly, trade will develop naturally.

Commerce will take its turn at prominence when it's ready. For now I see no reason to fret about slow progress on that front given how amazingly successful Bitcoin continues to be as a store of value. It is only natural that these two functionalities will take turns leapfrogging each other in importance over the years as Bitcoin (or another cryptocurrency) zigs and zags its way onto the world stage.

If you mean the way they disable access to your own money in fast and easy way, then yeah I agree.

Bitcoin is not difficult to use if all you want to do is send and receive bitcoins. My goodness, how hard is it to
a) install the client (gasp),
b) get a wallet id to send bitcoins to (horrors), and
c) hit the send button (on a scale of 1-10, impossible)

That's harder than setting up a paypal account? Get outa here.

Saw their post on the forum - so not sure how to answer that - but I guess you could say it took me a month or so to notice the post.


Not confusing at all  - got some mBTC from Gavin's faucet to play with and within a week or so after that I had bought around 10 BTC from a BTC purchasing service (not particular good rates but very easy).


No research at all (beyond an internet search for Bitcoin) - just downloaded and installed the software and then ran it (or did you mean something else?).


Apart from the issues of using an exchange to get BTC I really don't think my mother (my grandparents have been dead for many, many years sorry) would stuggle as much as she did learning how to use Word.

As for Suzy in accounting my wife (who studied accounting at uni) has no troubles with Bitcoin at all and waiting for the blockchain to download (when using the Satoshi client) is the only reason she wouldn't be up and running in 10 minutes.

The problem is related to price

For example, a lunch cost 10 euro in some europe country, then most of the time it cost 10 euro, even the exchange rate between euro and USD changed a lot

But for bitcoin it is not like this, the exchange rate decided how much the lunch will cost in bitcoin, it maybe cost 0.1 bitcoin this month and 0.2 bitcoin next month

The reason for this: There is no organization controlling the money supply to stablize the local price.

So, bitcoin is not really suitable to be used as a daily payment medium, it just stores value in long term and later when you need to spend it, you have the possibility to directly spend it at merchant sites. And I guess you would still mortgage bitcoin and get fiat loan to spend due to wider acceptance

Over time it is likely that the price will become more stable, however, in the meantime it is easy enough to quote prices in a local currency and provide a BTC conversion based upon the "current" rate (based upon Mt. Gox or some other source). The VPN I use does exactly this (i.e. the invoice is in USD for which a BTC value is calculated based upon the current rate when I decide to pay).

Assuming that you change your BTC back into fiat on a daily basis as a merchant (and you can always use a service such as Bitpay to do this automatically for you) then you will be insulated from these fluctuations.

PayPal is 15 years old. Amazon is 18 years old. It's not a level playing field comparing Bitcoin to a system that's three times older and more established. Bitcoin is also an open source system supported by good will and dreams not corporate backing. If you want to compare it with anything compare it to Linux. How old is Linux maybe 20+ years. In that time Linux has captured a whopping 1.26% market share. Sorry but corporate backing can push things a lot faster than good will and dreams.

OP you're looking at this like it's mature.  you need to see it like the internet was before the internet.  people who thought it would revolutionize things were laughed at.  people doubted anybody would want to purchase things "on line" instead of in person.  but those who saw it for it's potential weren't worried-- they knew the world would inevitably catch up.  they looked at the system and they could plainly see that it was too useful not to catch on.  so too it is with bitcoin.  come back in 30 or 50 years and you'll laugh at your post.  it might not be bitcoin itself, but it'll be something like bitcoin.

Well... not sure when you guys setup your paypal account... but I have mine now for about 10 years... the only reason I started with it initially... because my Gaming Clan was kinda requiring it to pay for our clan server.... I remember it taking a freaking week... to setup... I am not US based... and back then I was very lucky my country was one of the 10 first, to have debit cards being able to be linked to your paypal account... else I would've even needed to get a credit card... just to get paypal and pay for the clan server. Even though being lucky, it took 3 days for the paypal txn (where they take some cents from your account) to show up... and even then my bank wouldn't tell me the amount (which I had to tell paypal) over the phone... I actually had to schedule a bank appointment... to get those figures, before my end of month bill would come in...

Back then... PayPal was more of a hassle than bitcoin is now...

The biggest hurdle imo Bitcoin is seeing now, is there is no one company behind it, depending on its existence, being backed by banks / other big companies. (aka the trust factor that pulls people in easily) Because this is mainly what had paypal take off, they needed it to work, (so they could survive) so they put every effort in getting as many people as possible to accept it. The fact that there was no alternative, and that it basically worked like a credit card... helped a lot too.

Beyond that, the biggest problem is getting bitcoins for the regular person... for me as an IT guy... the easiest way... is just to mine myself / trade other crypto currencies for bitcoin... and even that is sloooooooooow....

The other thing that I'm hearing in my circle a lot is... why do I need bitcoins... which results into a discussion... that they don't even know how money works... most people use it on a day to day basis... but don't understand the concept of money... and / or fully realize that their FIAT is getting worth less every single day...

Last but not least... and this might be me... but people don't trust a system run by computers. The fact that bitcoin isn't controlled / run by a person... scares them... while bankers over and over again proved that they are not worthy of your trust...

The main thing we should want now, is a "first world" government, to outspokenly be for bitcoin, and start converting their local currency into bitcoin. This would give the trust in Bitcoin the boost it needs, for loads of major merchants to add it to their possible payment methods.

Last but not least, the ease of use... and the chances of being hacked... or not helping...

While I could learn my grandma easily how to use bitcoin online... I know that her PC is so infected with all kinds of junk...(yes I clean it up from time to time... still impressed with how much junk she manages to gather) that it barely keeps running... and her coins would just get hacked / stolen away... (while I currently don't see a real way to fix this... we need this fixed somehow...)

Then you get the physical aspect... while I love what Mike Caldwell is doing... We need a mint that mass-produces physical (milli)bitcoins, to get physical bitcoins out there for the masses. (trading a 10 USD bill, for a 10 mbtc bill, would give the physical part a major boost)

As mentioned before in this thread, the last part that would majorly help bitcoin, is loads of small game companies, starting to use bitcoin(satoshi's) as their ingame currency. (imo this would be beneficial for all parties involved as bitcoin by nature has been build secure / near impossible to duplicate coins) I think it would even convince some game companies to use in game currencies, as it would be so easy to implement. (I don't see any big company implementing this... they would see it as a big risk factor, redesigning their economy etc etc)

This is an excellent discussion, but I think luv2drnkbr hit the nail on the head here.  If we're comparing bitcoin to the internet, it's like the internet when it was 1992 and most people were scratching their heads and wondering, "The internet?  What would people ever use that for?"  Needless to say, no one asks that now.

Also, I have to take issue with the assertion that the confirmation time is a true deal breaker for bitcoin.  If you're comparing confirmations to the credit card world, it's a false comparison to call credit card confirmations instant.  Really, what's instant with credit cards is not confirmation, but authorization.  When you run your card, all that's happening is it checks to see if it's a valid card and not above the credit limit.  It's not confirmed.  I bought a domain name earlier this year with a credit card and this is exactly what happened - I bought it with my credit card, the authorization went through, but my bank called the next morning and thought there was fraud so they cancelled the transaction.  (The reason was because the domain registrar I use is in Germany and I'm not.)  I had to redo the transaction after saying, yes, it was legit, to actually buy the domain name.

So it's a false comparison because the "confirmation time" with bitcoin, if you compare to the actual confirmation with credit cards rather than the authorization, is actually much shorter.  In basically ten minutes, for small transactions anyway, you can be pretty sure that the transaction won't be reversed with bitcoin.  Whereas with credit cards it can be reversed 12 hours later if the Bank feels like it.

Does that 1.26% include the tablet / smartphone market (Android is Linux), the router market (your wifi router is probably Linux), the server market, etc.?

I think this basically hits the nail in the head. I think the success of bitcoin will be a large part depend on what will hopefully become a hindsight 15-20 years from now, just like the internet itself was in 1992.

The fact is crowdsourced content generation and social media, the main new internet trends in the past 10 years, have propelled many new companies formed recently to be smaller and more agile. What's more important is that these organizations can operate anywhere in the world, and many don't even physically need to be in the same place. Adding to this are the globalization trends led by developing economies such as China, India, those in South America, and many more. Having lived in several countries the past few years of various economic developments and political stability, I found it amazing that more and more people are speaking the same language by ways of the internet, regardless of religious, political, or economic backgrounds.

Furthermore, trades between smaller merchants and consumers that made the likes of eBay, Paypal, Alibaba, and to some extent Amazon so popular today are seeing great demands for internationalization. We are even seeing the interesting reverse trends of manufacturing heading back to fully developed countries like the US, perhaps because latest technologies have enabled manufacturing costs to go down, and also we are seeing the trends of greater international demands for US/European produced goods, because people internationally now can afford higher quality goods or even vanity products.

In summary, there is an ever-increasing demand for a platform that can be used to conduct trades globally at a smaller scale, basically in a c2c fashion. A decentralized currency like bitcoin is a great foundation to the payment facilitation piece of this puzzle, and it can build upon the foundation laid by c2c eCommerce platforms like eBay and the rising crowd-based brand advocacy made possible by social media.

That said, It's not an easy road though and require a lot of effort by the community to continue to pour significant energy and investment in strengthening the infrastructure and integration points, and perhaps a few "killer apps" along the way to speed up adoption. But from that standpoint, it does look like it's heading towards the right directions.

Concerning (a) from a newb perspective, google searches led me to try first installing the bitcoin-qt client, which yea, was a big turn off for me. I bought some BTC on gox then sent it to my bqt wallet address and was a bit shocked to not be able to see it for many days while the blockchain was being updated - 'where is my money??'. Also, the client sucked up all my cpu leaving me wondering what the heck was happening - software shouldn't be designed to 'go crazy' and burn up my laptop while hiding my money, so something must be wrong (I know why this happening now) - I imaging non-technical new users especially may have discouraging thoughts like this.

This is the first link to a 'bitcoin' search: http://bitcoin.org/ - the entrance to the rabbit hole for me. The 'choose-your-wallet' page, IMO, understates the time and resource issue. I recommend the bitcoin foundation to be a bit more explicit about these drawbacks and put a link to lightweight columns first in the list of wallets, stating clearly to start here if you are non-technical or want the 'quick start' option, instead of hiding this information in a popup that is accessed by hovering over an icon at the bottom of the page. It is a simple thing, but I think it will help to carry curious people further down the rabbit hole.

jd

Of course you realize you're making my point for me. Android is sold as a part of a phone so big business is backing it not good will and dreams. The first sign I've seen that we are going in the right direction to make me rich from holding my 2011-12 mined coins was the Winklevoss money. That's what we need more of to make Bitcoin businesses successful but that takes a special kind of dumbass gambling investor. The risk is too high and the legal ground under Bitcoin is shaky at best. Bitcoin just needs more time to smooth out all the bumps in the road first. It's just looney to say, Bitcoin is a whole four years old, has no corporate backing, a main exchange that trades less volume than the old Chicago Pork Bellies contracts used to why aren't we accepted and recognized everywhere yet?

Bitcoin competes (very well) with gold, silver, and art, which are all very valuable, but garner little interest from the average person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndshbH3qZ6Y.  Though it would be nice if Bitcoin were to become widely used for payments, it doesn't need to in order to be valuable.

True - but when most of the coins have been mined the tx fees are the *only* thing that will keep the network secure so if bitcoins aren't being used for many transactions then it could spell doom for the current implementation (so best to be used both as a store of value and as a currency rather than just the former).

Tx fees aren't the only way to buy network security.  For example, Mike Hearn talked about using assurance contracts to do it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.0).  It's pretty silly IMO to assume that people with a whole bunch of stored value at risk of becoming worthless wouldn't find ways to collectively ensure it doesn't.  Plus that's decades away, and not really worth thinking about now, as things will likely look so much different at that point.

IMO, we should not care too much about real economy, the future is in virtural economy and its size will bypass real economy later

Look at my nephews who are about 13-14 years old, most of their interest is in the internet, not real world. For this generation, the real world is only a support for the physical body, at least half of their enjoyment comes from the virtual world, since many things in virtual world are more perfect than real world and they have much more fun there. The only draw back is that today's virtual reality realisation is still far away from comfortable, 3D TV is a joke and very uncomfortable to use

Another fact is that merchant can handle the bitcoin sales seperately, not like fiat money sales, you can put those bitcoins at a saving account and hold it for a longer time. Because anyway people will not be totally dependant on bitcoin, the fiat sales could be enough to make back their cost, and bitcoin sales will become their capital reserve

Currently there are not so many people spend bitcoins, but that will improve over time, when more exchanges and more miners are willing to sell/spend their coins. Actually miners are the only provider of new coins to the economy, and if the coins they mined worth enough, they will start to spend them. Now daily new spending is maximum 3600 coins. Comparing with FED's daily spending of 2.8 billion new USD, it is obvious not so many people can receive bitcoin as a payment, if its price stayed at current level

Interesting link - thank you for posting that (well worth reading).


As the link you provided does point out if "no-one wants to pay" then worthlessness could indeed be the result - but I think the point of such contracts makes perfect sense and so I do also think that such creative solutions will probably address the issue that I raised (so point taken).

go on everyone continue...

It's too bad nobody picked up on this excellent post so far.

I don't necessarily think what you say is true, but *if* your assumption is true (that bitcoin doesn't need commerical transactions to be valuable), then that's a powerful argument against the claim that, for example, current btc/USD price is entirely "speculative".

And the argument is simple enough: gold hasn't been used for "transactions" in a long time, and has become less and less important as a tool to back up national currencies, but that certainly doesn't prevent it from storing a whole lot of wealth to this very day (the current price decay does not principally change this).

We will see... if enough people think bitcoin *needs* commercial transactions to be valuable, then it *will* need commercial transactions to be valuable. If enough people believe bitcoin's value is independent of that, then it'll be that. That's the basic truth of wealth and trading wealth anyway.

Here you can see from ASICMiner's relay of blocks that how many real transactions there are, comparing with the payment transactions from mining pools

http://photo.mystisland.org/transactions.jpg

Only twice as many transactions as a year ago, with a market value 10 times as large, and no reason to believe this is due to anything but speculation.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Bitcoin-Chart-2013-Number-of-Transactions-Per-Day.jpg

http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions
http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap

The bitcoin economy is growing, no doubt about this, but nobody said growth should be perfectly linear. There's a bit of a slowdown right now, but we shall not overreact to it. Things take time. In Europe, when national currencies were replaced by the Euro, with full support from all governments, many people kept on thinking in their old currencies. It's much more complicated with bitcoin that no government and no big company officially supports.

Unless part of that increase in market cap to no. of transaction ratio is due to bitcoin being used as a store of wealth. I'm not saying that is the reason, but I'm not lazy enough to rule it out purely on whim either.

QFT.

You know, for a group of people using a currency supposedly built on a rejection of the "bubble-economics" of central banks, you guys sure sound like a bunch of dot-com investors claiming that the "old rules" no longer apply.

Great discussion but it needs a little more depth from the big picture! ;)

What is the time frame for success? Everyone using bitcoins tomorrow? Next year? by 2020? Without a goal, we have nothing!

Secondly, as many people have pointed out, Bitcoin is the Internet circa 1992 - I was there, it was awful. If we use this as a guide, then we have a number of hurdles to deal with.

Firstly, we are beyond the technical issues, bitcoin works as it should, and it can be tweaked for scale, just like the interest in 1992.  
The current problem is legal, which the internet also had to deal with.  Online copyright was a huge problem in 1992 - who owned what? What laws counted?  Who was responsible if? etc - these are the same questions that bitcoin needs to address.  Once that happens, then its the next stage, mass adoption.

In the UK, we had a number of ISPs who gave us the push to make the internet popular, the most famous being Freeserve.  The downside of this popularity was that the freeservers knew nothing, and blocked up the bandwidth!  
Who will be the market makers for bitcoin?  We need to grow the current market from its 2 million users to at least a billion, if not more before bitcoin becomes something.

With mainstream we got economies of scale, and finally e-commerce stared making sense - and this only really stated happening in the last 10 years.  Bitcoin needs to find its niche, which I agree is probably micro payments of less than $100 a deal. It needs to be better, and cheaper than paypal - and be able to prove it to anyone who doubts it.

There is a huge difference between being an asparagus type geek who can handle the foibles of bitcoin, and the rest of society.  The mindset change needed to turn bitcoin into a a must have useful and appealing tool of the mass market is so big, I can't even start to describe it.  We are talking about thinking like a 15 year old girl, and getting her to expect to use bitcoin everywhere - because she finds it better than anything she currently uses!

Please don't think I'm being ageist or sexist or whatever offensivist I might be! The point is that mainstream take up has far more 15 year old girls than it have technical libertarian geeky types.

Once we turn that corner, then the son of bitcoin will be in every digital wallet on the planet, but in reality, its not going to happen until at least 2025!

Bitcoin will see mass adoption for transactions far faster than you expect.

There is some mind-blowing stuff coming out. Look at https://www.pikapay.com/ (https://www.pikapay.com/) (in beta) for example, in which btc can be simply tweeted (send or receive) by anyone with a twitter account, they hint at a massive future for btc transactions. It's pure bloody genius systems like this that keep me very positive.

Compare to Dot-com era:

Total number of websites took 3 years to double between 2000-2003. Internet growth was in a bubble at the time and suffered a crash, yet look what happened: it wasn't all speculation & hype.

https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3095/2387270804_c8a14cc063_o.jpg

LMFAO====> how about try 1981 !!!

*link restored!*~> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET

+1

who is ASICMiner? 


>>WTF!!!!!

Bitcoin features should be used to enter existing markets but also to create new markets where payments would be impossible or very difficult/dangerous/impractical to do.

This is what happened with Silk Road and now Atlantis. It made online purchases convenient, easy and safe even for difficult products and services.

Another field available is upload/download services. I looked for and just a couple of file hosting services accept bitcoin.

In my opinion, a plug-in to tip good eMule uploaders would be an interesting way to diffuse the use of bitcoin on a large group of people.
For example: Good uploader Hans upload 1 GB of data to me. With the plug-in I tip him 0.01 BTC (around 1 US$) and automatically Hans' client (and mine) reduce his "credits" versus me by 1 GB.
Now, for him I become a good uploader with a verified history and he become a good uploader for me.

If 1/10th of the users paid 1$ worth of bitcoin to the good uploaders, they would pay 50K US$ every month (at least). This is chips & fish, but more people would have bitcoin to spend and reasons to spend them and hold them and maybe use or acquire them for other uses. People could finance their monthly subscription in this way and have Bitcoins to spend.

I added a feature request to the Official eMule forum:
http://forum.emule-project.net/index.php?showtopic=156816&st= (http://forum.emule-project.net/index.php?showtopic=156816&st=)

Wait, is eMule a project that came from eDonkey?

There is no Bitcoin economy and there never has been, it's all lies and deception to justify higher prices in the minds of a few bubble driven speculators. ASICs aren't an economy. The only thing we have are Silk Road and Satoshi Dice.

Aside from that, all other economic indicators I know of like bitcoinstore.com, Humble Bundle sales figures, Reddit Gold figures etc. suggest that Bitcoin simply isn't a currency. If anything besides a store of value, it's a USD proxy to buy certain goods.

I do think that Bitcoin can work simply as a store of value, but actual uses would be a boost, and I'd suggest to look for uses where Bitcoin has not only an advantage, but uses which without Bitcoin would be impossible.

What point is that, that those who pay for marketing are going to sell?

Quick, call the presses!

The point is that a free open source software project has incredible penetration is many different markets and has in fact displaced many closed commercial *nix's.

When's the last time you saw a server running Solaris?
Just 13 years ago, Sun was the company that put the dot in dot.com

It was this free operating system by an international group of enthusiasts that provided something better and Sun is gone now.

My point is Android chose Linux because Linux was already a success.
It isn't Android that made Linux a success.

Is that the point you were trying to make?

Yes

But those uses do not necessarily need to be practical uses in order to provide a huge boost to the Bitcoin economy.  There is great potential for the application that seamlessly ties in to social networking, "likes", trendiness, rebellion, or lottery.

No, that's not it yet. Here it is in a shorter version.

Bitcoin would be more successful if it had big money behind it fighting legislators and promoting it. It's still young and this can happen. Be patient and give it time to grow.

Silk Road and now Atlantis. It made online purchases convenient, easy and safe even for ILLEGAL AND DANGEROUS products and services.

I disagree. If you look at all the products and services you can buy with bitcoins, and compare it to what you could buy with all of the other currencies ever invented and used by mankind throughout history, the bitcoin economy is one of the most successful economies in history.  You can buy food, clothing, gadgets, services, consumables, etc. with bitcoins.

ePills = MDMA = RAT POISON

more likely

YOU ARE THE MAN!!!

we <3 >>

Blitz­
Donator
Hero Member


SPREAD WORD BUD!!!!


>>>YOU ROCK!!!!!

ya man = consumable BATH SALTS maybe hand delivered by the feds!!!


>>OUCH!!!!

And who actually USES Bitcoin to perform such transactions? The supply side is there, but the demand side not.

Like I said:

*shrug*

Whatever perspective suits you, I guess. The Bitcoin community continues developing, regardless.



What does it matter that it's not a currency? Gold isn't either, yet it's still valuable, and won't be going away anytime soon (despite decades of anti-gold propaganda, no less.) Why is it that if there's not an overwhelming abundance of goods and services available solely for bitcoins, something must be wrong?



It's a digital currency. If you ignore it's key features (pseudonymous transactions, limited amount, decentralized,) then any other digital payment system can do what it does just as well, better in many cases. About the only thing that can be done that's impossible without Bitcoin is storing wealth anonymously without needing a third party (EDIT: and pseudonymously sending it across the planet without a middle-man.) That's it, it really has no other advantage. Because that's the one primary feature set it was designed to have.

The inevitable conclusion is, there's not going to be any trick or secret key, no undiscovered catalyst to accelerate the growth of the Bitcoin economy. Other than in the area of anonymous wealth storage (which doesn't require any real infrastructure,) it's just going to have to grow at the same slow, steady pace as anything else.

(EDIT: Also, private transactions are a potential, Bitcoin-only growth area, I suppose; the tricky part there is that we live in a society where most people don't value privacy very much, except those trying to evade societal controls. Guess that means we should be focusing on North Korea as our growth market?)

small-scale drug traders in Latin America and the Caribbean love bitcoin?

>>WTF!!!!

Comparisons to the internet and it's growth are utterly irrelevent.

The internet allowed people to do so many things that just weren't possible before the internet and it has utterly transformed peoples lives and the methods of interactions, shopping, entertainment etc.

By comparison Bitcoin does virtually nothing that cannot be achieved already with money. It is a potential store of value/speculation, but at its heart was designed to be a payment mechanism and it has yet to prove to the masses that it is a better or cheaper payment mechanism than that which exists already.



As for the state of the Bitcoin economy, there are a number of BTC evangelists (mainly on here) who do buy stuff with Bitcoins, but the rest of the use is either gambling, illegal purchases or the biggest use of Bitcoin - buying it hoping that some other people will use it and it'll go up in value. Until that changes it's a rough-ride folks.

Bitcoin and TOR was intended to be used to support the U.S.A. to encourage whistleblowing and take down corrupted governments >> foundations etc!!!

.


>>>GOOD WORK!!!!!

Gambling is another market for people in places where online gambling is not legal, but where people wish to be free to do so. 

Personally, I think that gambling and micro transactions, similar to Silk Road, are going to be growth areas for bitcoin.  Kind of like porn was for VHS.

The bitcoin is valued at current price just because there are still many uncertainties, if everything has settled well, the price will be magnitudes higher due to very limited amount of coins in circulation

It is very funny, the purchase power of USD is maintained stable by people's belief that FED will follow their mandate to ensure the price stablility, although they know nothing about what FED is doing

Similarly, the purchasing power of bitcoin will always rise in long term, this consensus is also achieved by people's belief that bitcoin's total supply is fixed. As long as that belief do not get shaken, the consensus will not change easily

Current bitcoin investors hope to get as much coin as possible before the majority join the game, regardless of price. They are currently heavily invested in mining equipment instead of buying, because the historical return is higher, but when more mining equipment were made and the per equipment return dropped below the cost, some of them will start to buy coins

Silk road crime scene is fun for them however difficulty is rising selling bath salts due to customers aggressive use of drug testing kits!!!!


>>>BUMMER!!!!!!

Here's a simple insight that I enjoyed:

Source: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html)

I couldn't disagree more.

The reason bitcoin is valued in double digits currently is due to speculation that there will be greater demand for holding coins in the future and thus the current exchange rate is justified or undervalued even.

But what causes this demand to hold coins?   

Simply as a store of value?  Certainly, those who bought in early April and still hold those coins don't think bitcoin is such a great store of value.   There are a number of stores of value with less risk than Bitcoin at these exchange rates.

When Bitcoin is used as a medium of exchange that creates demand for coins.  You can't send a Bitcoin payment without first acquiring those coins.  If a business receives coins as revenue and then will be using bitcoins in the future for purchasing goods and services, or paying out dividends, then the merchant is likely to hold a balance of coins for the short duration between when the revenue transaction occurred and when the spending will occur.     Holding the coins for that short amount of time, though, decreases the quantity available for sale at the exchanges and, in aggregate, bitcoin gaining traction as a currency causes the exchange rate to rise.

It doesn't matter where the demand for bitcoins comes from ...   whether it be as a means of exchange, remittance payments, speculation (hoarding), forex trading, etc., .... any coin that doesn't end up being sold means less resistance to a rising exchange rate.

The reason traction in retail and e-commerce is seen as so important by many is because of what it will do to the exchange rate if it happens.   If it happens, a BTC/USD of $10,000 is not crazy talk.  Without it, a BTC/USD of $2 might be the more fair valuation.

hold coins?    how can you hold something invisible other than those "bitcoins" from Utah!!!LOL

>>>WTF!!!!!

Smoothie did you get banned again?

WaverleyStreet could you please stop your annoying spam posts?

You are ruining a very interesting read.

I will ask you this once, otherwise you will be the very first person I actually put on my ignore list.

Bitcoin was used in online gaming but no service really had been "killing it".  Then on April, 17th 2012, fireduck realized he was on to something.  His new gambling site, 1209k was attracting more users than he felt comfortable handling so he sold the service which the new owner rebranded as SatoshiDICE and in a couple weeks the blockchain transaction chart started to hockey stick.

Within 30 days a "killer app" (online gambling seeing its "drop" hit millions of dollars worth each month) went from "could happen" to "happening before our very eyes".

We know there are dozens of "killer apps".   The remittance industry is another one.  Even if just the hawalders figured out the opportunity that Bitcoin provides them with, there's a huge amount of Bitcoin transactions that would result.  Hawalders transfer money in which there is required trust between the intermediaries.   Bitcoin disintermediates hawala -- breaking it down into there being simply two independent exchange transactions (i.e., bitcoins bought in one location, and bitcoins exchanged back to fiat in another).

Personally, I think the place Bitcoin will have the largest impact is with cyber-equities markets.  This is currently the category known as "equity crowdfunding" but that is a category that today essentially does not exist due to regulatory friction.   The JOBS act was passed more than a year ago and the SEC still is at least a half year away from finishing the rulemaking they are tasked with.  Even then, what is available today on BitFunder, Cryptostocks, Picostocks, (or funds like Havelock offers) will not qualify for use in the U.S. due to various reasons, including how investment in those vehicles for speculation can be made anonymously -- and thus there is no method for the authorities to enforce tax laws.

But look at ASICMINER, which is possibly the most highly valued company ever to go the "equity crowdfunding" route.  When there are more and more successes in companies who raised capital through these cyber-equities markets I expect that to be the catalyst for an unprecedented level of transaction activity for bitcoins.

sorry but I have not bothered to read all the 5 pages on this subject but... think about it.

what does extreme volatility mean? it means only the most entrenched believers will stay and everyone knows the price will go up again as demand surges.

so what is the probable outcome of this? extreme distribution before the full ecosystem is fully running.

People will gamble, hedge their bets, transfer money, buy goods at a low level because of the instability, but the instability will disappear when it reaches a certain threshold causing the currency to flatline. Bitcoin is now worldwide there are nodes active in every single country at one moment or another; think about it, that is a Bitcoin seed being planted growing organically much like it did from the Genesis Block, the one who knows what it can be nurtures it, grows it, spreads its seeds and waits for the day that it is fully grown and ready to bare fruit.

Each barrier to growth is known,The White Paper; the creation story, the Genesis Block; the sharing,discussion among the experts, Lazlos Pizza; the experiment in its value, MtGox; the gathering, BitcoinJ; the world domination tour.

I was born in Honduras and I can tell you, everyone there has a phone... I can buy a phone that you buy here for 400-600 dollars for 50-100 dollars there because we don't have the same regulations that there are in the western countries, we buy direct from Korea, Japan, China. If the citizens of the most violent country in the world have access to all communication technology, what is to stop it from going there? language? culture?  The major foundations of Bitcoin have been built, now it's time for the people of the world to embrace it through their cell phones.

The things to monitor I believe are the exchanges; They will be the marker of non-techies entering the market, it will die down when the Bitcoin ecosystem is more developed. When the ecosystem is fully built there will be direct ways for everyone to earn bitcoin without mining it, it will have become decentralized.

The ease of acquiring bitcoins; The systems of the world are closed, they flow from one to the other, spreading, converging like water does in nature; no one ever worries about finding money because it is everywhere to be found in its natural habitat, with a little effort you can get some yourself, so will it be with bitcoins; A closed system that flows when the time is right.

Everyone will accept it; you will know that bitcoin has arrived when the beggars on the street know and accept bitcoin too.

The language will change; A language that denotes doubt and discrimination or fear is one that speaks of greater fears, non-questioning denotes compliance acceptance. That moment will come when it is so easy that everyone else is doing it, you'll feel stupid to ask someone for help because everyone is doing it, why would you question it?

These things will come when the system is world wide when you have 7 billion people across the planet actively trying to get one coin it will be very hard to hoard. The level of hoarding will be extreme just before that moment arrives but it will be for small amounts because of the ever increasing difficulty of getting one and that is when the ecosystem will begin branching out, people will begin working for them.

The amount necessary for this is a market cap for Bitcoin of 42 billion USD, only a fraction of that will be circulated actively everyday; 6 bitcoins for every human being alive. the amount of active commerce will have to match the active movement of the currency that requires a lot of variety in purchasing power... don't look for single service providers look for meta-providers with thousands of products thats when you know the time for Bitcoin is near.

does that guy work for the bitcoin numismatics dept????


>>>WTFFFF!!!!

I think the biggest obstacle Bitcoin has ever faced, and will continue to face, is ignorance. Bitcoin presents a set of serious advances in the world of commerce and finance, though the masses have yet to educate themselves of these advances. The greatest service we could do to both Bitcoin and our fellow peers is to spread the word, disseminate knowledge, and introduce those around us to this new technology. I found out about Bitcoin 3 years ago, but only in the last year have I truly understood the full scope of its paradigm shifting nature. Though we might think progress is coming slowly, or maybe not coming at all, consider this: just over 6 years ago there was no such thing as Bitcoin, and now it's the most highly valued currency on the planet.

your siggy~>LOL!!!

" If we hit that bullseye the rest of the bitcoins will fall like a house of cards. ...Checkmate! "


membermark from me to you !!!!


>>>I GOT LOVE FOR YOU GUYS!!!!!

Consider someone that stores $100,000 of value in bitcoins for a year, and during that year, someone who only uses them for daily transactions, and so only holds on average of $100 worth at any given time.  You'd need a thousand of the latter guys to affect the total valuation as much as a single one of the former.  That's why I don't think it's a requirement that the masses use Bitcoin in everyday transactions in order for it to be valuable, though it would of course help.  Keep in mind that people currently store much greater amounts of value than all the bitcoins are worth in assets that are much worse, technically, than Bitcoin.  Re: volatility, I'm willing to chalk it up to Bitcoin being new and in a state of flux.

This is exactly wrong!

Sorry for being direct, but ignorance doesn't stop something being successful!

For instance, do you know how your electric is produced - down to which power station is supplying your electricity, and what size fuses you have in your property?  

Do you know exactly how your food is produced, down to which farm your burgers came from?

Do you know exactly how to produce, write and perform in a sci fi movie?  Do you need to to pay for a ticket and to enjoy the show?

For almost everyone, the answer is no - yet they help do their part in making the economy work for those markets!

The general public don't need to know hardly anything about bitcoin - except that it works, and is a trustworthy way to buy and sell goods.

This isn't about education, its about trust and benefits - without enough of these, bitcoin isn't going to work!

:)

For every single one of those examples that you listed, their adoption and widespread use depends on massively monopolistic structures which are in many, if not all cases, State sponsored. It's not like we really have much of a say in any of those choices. It's what our systems provide us. Bitcoin is a decentralized and open source system. This makes it's adoption entirely a product of people's awareness and willful choice to use it. This is necessarily limited by their knowledge of what it is and how it works (I'm not going to put my fiat fortunes into a shady software in which I have no clue how it works).  It's my opinion that Linux is a vastly superior operating system to Windows. However, because Microsoft creates monopolies through their legal and corporate manipulations, operating systems like Linux (open-source, free, and community driven) get the short end of the stick. They don't have as many applications written for them, or anywhere near as much market share in many different regards. This is the cost of having something being free/decentralized/open source. It's adoption can't be forced on the world through law or capitalism. It must be sought out by those who seek to use it for its benefits.

SatoshiDice as in Erik Voorhees ?

"...[SatoshiDice]-it is responsible for roughly half of all bitcoin transactions that have ever occured..." - Erik Voorhees - The Role of Bitcoin as Money - Bitcoin 2013 Conference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2YllvbJo6g


>>>THANK YOU NICE LINK!!!!

Bitcoin penetration is now in illegal drugs, and gambling. A new good or method is canalized to the most needed places first. This is totally in line with the market, unavoidable and positive.

What's next? A third of all trade in Kenya is currently done with a sort of mobile money system. The operator eats 10 percent of each transaction, and still the people there prefers it. Then, take into account that their payment isn't really money, it is a transfer of debt just like a bank transfer. The feeling of getting bitcoins ringing into you phone is a totally different experience, it is something like holding a gold coin. A soon as they start to use bitcoins, they must feel it too.

Most people do not need to know the details of the crypto, the mining and so on. They need only rules of thumb for backup and password selection, and such things. Confidence will come with experience and via the jungle telegraph.

There are no obstacles to a wide adoption, only inertia.

i agree the chinese have a clear advantage mining bitcoins because of the lack of regulations in the Nuclear Power field...in fact U.S. corporations set them up there because of this fact!!!

= RADIOACTIVE BITCOINS!!!LOL

>>>WHO TOLD YOU!!!!?;)

i first heard about TOR - SILK ROAD - DARKWEB - BITCOIN last spring from pharmaceutical researchers living in Amhurst, Massachusetts. Widespread adoption will be difficult because of the amound of disk space involved and "backdoors" written in the code!!!! Not to mention promoters who frontloaded and censor anyone who quetions their authority on Bitcoin!!!!


= "PSUDO-OPEN SOURCE" ~IN MY HONEST OPINION .

>>> WTF PEOPLE!!!!>>>HELP ME!!!!

This is the most realistic post in the thread.

Bitcoin is not the new internet.  It is not the new Paypal.  It is not the new ecommerce, or dotcom boom.  It is not a shiny new toy for the world which will be joyfully adopted by teenaged girls and grandmas.

It is something much grimmer then that.  It is a response to, and a defense against the increasing repression by the corporate and governmental powers that be which has been enormously facilitated by the internet.

Reading Satoshi's posts this is very clear.  Did he sound to anyone like some starry eyed web entrepreneur?

So far, its only real advantages have been in circumventing drug prohibition, contributions to banned organizations, tax avoidance, and "money laundering".  It's nature is to be against the system.  That isn't going to change, and I predict that all the purveyors of techno-utopian Silicon Valley happy-talk are going to waste millions before they
recognize this.

The year is not 1992.  The year is 1984.  The world is not about to enter a boom.  The financial system is absurdly overburdened with debt, and global demographics point to a catastrophic decline, and quite likely large scale war, over the next 20 years.  Power has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and those entities, whether states or corporations are actively seeking to increase their control over the masses.

Like it or not, the role of Bitcoin is as a weapon of resistance. 

believe me i for one sipped the bitcoin kool aid and we do need positive change in the world. However i'm all too familiar with boilerroom type hype and wow it's getting hot up in here!!!LOL;)

>>WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

The concentration of hash power due to ASIC is a negative thing for the moment, hope that evens out quickly

Before, GPUs are available to everyone, a gamer with 1-2 ATI graphic cards can start mining right away without any investment, and a tiny $1000 investment will get anyone a decent rig of 1GH, which mines half a coin per today for many months, almost no barrier of entry

Most of the people are IT enthusiasts, mining is fun, and most of them don't really looking for a serious income

But now in ASIC era, with more and more manufacturer defined devices, that fun is lost more or less. Many people are looking for quick profit, since miners are the biggest actor in bitcoin economy, without more and more miner join the game due to barrier of entry, the bitcoin popularity will go down

And coin generation halfs every 4 years do not help either, soon at 2016 people will realize that 75% of all the coins are already mined and the game has almost finished its initial distribution of wealth, there will be even less people join the mining game

At that stage, the driven power for bitcoin popularity could be the collapse of fiat money or the huge support from some large enterprise. But I guess any corporation with some serious real economy output during a fiat money crisis would prefer to issue their own money instead of let a bunch of geeks who sitting on the pre-mined coins benefit from their economy significance

So it takes time, those large bitcoin holders must drive the real/virtual economy behind it to further increase its utility. The possible scenario I can think of: Some super popular IT product that is only payable in bitcoin

Why do you mine bitcoin?
To buy USB Block Erupter
What is the use of a USB Block Erupter?
To mine bitcoin
 ;D ;D ;D

Bitcoin is most definitely a weapon, the weapon of choice for mass Intelligence, information. It is basically encouraging 3 million current users to learn; What is money? learn about the money system and how it is built, to question why people have to work 2-3 jobs with their spouses and soon their children too. What does the system do? does it encourage consumerism? does it establish schools as the single source of life education? We know the Neo-Keynsian model, force them to work, force them to spend... is this healthy?

Bitcoin is definitely a response to our current system with the question; Why the hell do you need my name and payment information just to read your article?

  Power is being concentrated, a paycheck is increasingly being used as the weapon of choice to control the masses as it ever dwindles into fewer and fewer hands; Can you believe that out of the billions made by online companies the ones who benefit could fill up a medium sized stadium? What will you do with money when it is hoarded by the 1 percent and it becomes harder and harder to make them spend it... do you see an analogy with Bitcoin?
  Automation is not helping out either, it just strikes me as funny that a message was sent out with this software; We can automate your industries too and your money and power has prevented your industry from being automated even though it is easier to automate than the auto industry.

  Bitcoin is a system a technique for freedom from mass serialization... do you know your number? is it tattood on your skin along with your bank account number and information, are these governments and corporations truly entitled to have this knowledge about you? Why shouldn't we? you know there are laws against people opening your mail, why can they read your e-mails? They are amassing so much knowledge about us, why not let us all see what you are up to too? If you get too tired and need to re-invent yourself in Bitcoin you just need to make a new address and start fresh, in the real world your information follows you till the day you die.
 
As society further entrenches itself in new laws and new lines of power created by our current system a new one must be created with a better foundation to create a new path that these laws do not allow us to follow. Bitcoin is creating incredible innovation it is letting people see things in a new way without the baggage from the old, we will only take what is useful from the old to the new. Think of all the barriers they create through laws that control us in a broken system that lobbies for our strict control as if we were cattle, think of all the fear that is created as the purveyors of purchasing power now control who and what we can empower, should a system as big as that of the credit cards, banks be this politisised that it controls through fear what is allowed without government mandate from the people.

*slow clap*

+1

I guess you had to be there. The internet in the mid 90's was about as welcome as PC-DOS was in the late 80's. Most people back then did not want to use the internet, after all they could get the news on TV or newspaper and didn't have to wait for images to slowly display, line by agonising line over a 2400 baud modem that hogged their telephone line. Where was the advantage in that, they would say, given the cost and hassle of setting things up. Email? No one else they knew had it so there was no point, it was useless.  99.9% of people haven't heard of bitcoin; for most of those that had 4 months ago it was akin to a kids gaming currency; to even be taken serious by a gov't agency is a major step forward. If you don't think it's got promise and potential that's fine, but don't write it off just yet. You don't have to be starry eyed, but at least be open-minded.

We need to market bitcoin like its a new product. Companies spend millions and never sell anything. We can start small with T-shirts From a website like www.thebitcoinminingoutlet.com.. Here is a great place to pick up a T-shirt and support our cause.

Winklevoss Twins IPO is a big move, I also think digital asset is the best suitable category for bitcoin currently

The interesting thing with bitcoin is, the fundamental support behind bitcoin (mass acceptance by merchants) will only be established after it is widely accepted as an asset with high return, not the other way around. In bitcoin's world, almost everything is against the traditional wisdom  ;D ;D

 ",,,since miners are the biggest actor in bitcoin economy.. "

try: coders and developers putting in the hard hard work~what we need is all the bitcoin hoarding to stop and get back on track with the open source concept like satoshi said: i'm gonzo--- call me crazy!!!LOL

>>>WHATTT!!GIVE MY COINS UP!!!!BOOOO

".. their telephone line. Where was the advantage in that, .."

>>the advantage you could hank the wire out of the wall if and when you were being hacked i remember!!LOL




"  99.9% of people haven't heard of bitcoin; for most of those that had 4 months ago it was akin to a kids gaming currency; to even be taken serious by a gov't agency is a major step forward. "


>> are you referring to the stateside drug bust last week which involved a certain guv agency?

>>WTF!!!

oh how far we've come. I remember when the only market that existed was SR  ;D

And I remember when there were no markets at all and Satoshi was working to integrate a simple sales board into the P2P network itself.

People complaining about slow growth have no historical perspective. Bitcoin is growing faster than most other technological phenomenons that I can think of. There's also a lot of growth happening that you can't directly observe. I talk to a bunch of Bitcoin businesses and their growth figures in terms of signups per week are eyepopping.

Transactions per day excluding popular addresses (ie SD and DeepBit):

  http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular

Increased by 10,000 per day in 6 months, despite strong banking headwinds.

I agree that the next step is to increase visibility of Bitcoin businesses, especially the in person kind. I have some ideas for how to do that, if you have some Android experience and are looking for a project, get in touch.

VPS and VPN are the primary things I'd spend bitcoins on.  Would you list some vendors for us?

I think the state of the Bitcoin economy depends on the context and expectations you examine it with.

If you're expecting Bitcoin to be the new individual global currency to rule the world and to render all currencies worthless, the the Bitcoin economy is still very far away from achieving that.
If you do see Bitcoin this way, I may be wrong here, there's no comparison that can be drawn as there hasn't recently been a global currency, but for all we know, Bitcoin my be doing exceptionally well at becoming a global currency compared to other attempts!

If you're seeing Bitcoin as a piece of open source software (which ultimately is what it is) then it's doing pretty good: lots of users, lots of publicity, lots of active development.

Regarding the Bitcoin economy, personally, I think usability or understandability as a result of marketing is still an issue. I'm in 2 minds about this though. The computer scientist nerd side of me that loves the amazing technology thinks that everyone should know about Bitcoin just to appreciate it's ingenuity, and that a person shouldn't use Bitcoin unless they fully understand how the block chain works and other core concepts otherwise it's almost a waste.
However, the average Joe non-computer-scientist side of me remembers that the whole point of a currency is convenience and practicality. From that side, a user should be able to use Bitcoin without knowing or having any understanding of the tech behind it. After all, I'm sure a lot less people would use cash if you thought you first had to understand quantitative easing, fractional reserve banking and futures trading.

At the moment, it's very rare to see people sell the concept Bitcoin to the average joe. Most people sell it to the techie or the libertarian or the anarchist. Most of the time, people are selling ideas and beliefs associated with Bitcoin, e.g. "Bitcoin is this really cool piece of software. It's a p2p currency with some really novel uses of cryptography." or "Bitcoin is this new currency that's going to overthrow the banks and solve problems of quantitative easing and distribution of wealth."

I think, in reality, Bitcoin should be marketed more as "it's quick cheap payments. Go to <insert BTC payment processor or online wallet> sign up and you can accept payments far quicker and easier even than PayPal!" Arguably that's still selling my idea of the benefits of Bitcoin, but the point I'm making is that we need to sell Bitcoin for what it is at the moment for the average joe, not what each of us believes it should be or what we each think is amazing about it.

Also, giving away bitcoins would probably help. That's obviously not what a lot of people and to do and is highly contradictory to the current trend which is to hold your Bitcoins. Imagine if the Winkelwhatever twins stood in the middle of New York or London giving away their Bitcoins for free on memory sticks, gox vouchers, casascius coins etc. If someone gave you something you weren't familiar with and said it was worth nearly $100 - you'd probably go away and learn some more about it.
If only it was legal tender, then merchants that do deal with Bitcoin could give all their change in bitcoins, even for fiat transaction - now that would boost things a bit!

+1

This is why I feel that people supporting "regulation" of Bitcoin are missing perhaps the crucial point of this technology.

Like it or not, but money is at the very core of how our society works. While many agree that the current system is not very good as it allows for huge centralization of power, wealth as well as misallocation of capital, unsustainable projects and economic behavior etc. a lot of those people would argue that the way to change this is by passing new legislation and changing the system from the top down i.e. a revolution. I don't agree with this at all, because it seems quite clear to me that this approach tends to yield just more of the same. The way to go in my eyes is by evolution of a parallel system. One of the reasons why people cling to the old system is fear of the unknown. They have trouble imagining (helped by massive amounts of propaganda) things working in alternative ways. Growing alternative systems can go a long way, but those systems will be seen as a threat by the status quo and fought as such. Fortunately decentralized technology provides ways of defense against attacks by current power elites. The internet P2P sharing have done this with the flow of information - it's getting more and more out of control of those who would seek to control it. Bitcoin is a way to the same with money - the foundation of our current society. It's a big thing.

To me, Bitcoin is not about enhancing the current system. I don't want to see something as dreadful as the current financial system getting more efficient. It's about replacing the current system. All the pieces are in place - the inherent flaws of the current system are becoming more obvious to more and more people every day, it is primed to collapse sooner or later and there is fertile ground in terms of culture for the embracing of alternatives. The technology to address this has already been created. Now it becomes a question of growing this technology up to scale.

The Bitcoin economy is obviously still in its infancy. It has come a long way already in a short period of time. I reckon there will come a time, before widespread adoption, where the community will arrive at a crossroads and have to decide; do we want to go the way of trying to integrate Bitcoin with current systems, or do we want it to stand its ground as a "weapon of resistance" and provide a much needed alternative?

H.G.Wells famously noted that "history is a race between education and catastrophe". Watching the slow motion collapse and consecutive propping up of the current financial system in recent years has made me pessimistic about the outcome of this race. Bitcoin is the biggest factor to emerge in recent years which makes me think/hope that education might win after all. Just think about how much you learned thanks to Bitcoin. I know I have. Not too long ago I knew nothing about cryptography and digital signatures. Now I have appeared in print media and given a presentation about just that. Same goes for the topic of money and political philosophy. Bitcoin is a huge catalyst for educating people and only educated people are able to make informed decisions.

Let's be clear and admit now that BTC does NOTHING to solve wealth imbalance issues.  It is entirely worthless in that capacity for a variety of issues:

1.  Anyone who presently has dollar wealth can just exchange dollars for BTC on an exchange

2.  Once BTC is widely established as a currency, a robber baron of industry can demand payment in BTC and acquire disproportionate amounts of it

Arguably worse than Fiat once great wealth imbalances occur since BTC is largely anonymous. You would know that huge accounts exist out there but have no idea which 1%'er owns the private key.

I agree. However, I believe Bitcoin exposes the truth: that wealth imbalances are primarily the result of political restrictions, not merely capital inheritance.

Hmm. Personally, I think that's about one of the worst ways to go about it.

First, it requires someone to spend a vastly disproportionate amount of their wealth for what is essentially advertising.

Second, it's not very good advertising. In my experience, you simply can't prompt busy people to explore technical challenges like that. Half of the people given those $100 USB sticks wouldn't believe you and would throw them in the trash. Half of those left would either not have the technical capacity (or care) to extract the money, and would never get around to it. Most of the rest would simply be given to a more computer-savvy friend to figure out, and would curiously be never brought up again by the friend.

But hey, I could be wrong. I wouldn't bet my money on it though.

The point is that a "real economy" is larger than just "selling legitimate products".  We can build businesses all day long that sell legitimate products, but if none of them ever expand beyond the point of immediately cashing out into some other currency in order to pay suppliers and employees, they will eventually fail and the Bitcoin economy will simply be worse off for the experience.

If there really are 10,000 legitimate Bitcoin businesses (which I doubt), then why are you the only one who knows about them?  Why aren't there more than a few of them in only two areas trading Bitcoins with each other?

We must become social engineers.  We must be innovative.  It is not about cryptography.

The wallet must be cool.  The transactions must be exciting.

Women are the answer.  

In most societies women do the most of the shopping, and until women use Bitcoin as easily and freely as they use their credit cards Bitcoin will never be mainstream.  In the retail consumer space women are the star players, but in the Bitcoin space these star players are not on the field, on the bench, or even in the stadium!  Talk to all the women you can about Bitcoin and how it can make their lives better.

Women love power:
Money is a form of power and with Bitcoin it's power that nobody can take away from her.

Women love security:
How much easier would it be for a woman to get out of an abusive relationship if she had a stash of Bitcoins?

Women love their children:
Getting some Bitcoins for her kids when they're young and giving it to them when they're 18 or 21 could potentially be a life changing event.

Women love to look good in front of other women:
Bitcoins are very stylish and will never decline her purchase in a department store or while having lunch with her girlfriends.

Women love to buy things on sale:
Goods and services priced in Bitcoin can be sold for less, and discounted female oriented products and services priced in BTC will  increase both awareness and adoption among the people that do most of the shopping.


Get someone like Dr. Stephanie Murphy from the "Let's Talk Bitcoin" podcast to be on the Oprah Winfrey show and you'll really see things heat up.


Also, don't forget to teach your kids about Bitcoin.......they are the future.
 

How about taking the idea of Bitcoin to a new level with BitShares:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RLcjSXWuU9vBJzzqLEXVACSCdn8zXKTTJRN_LfoCjNY/

This will solve the volatility problem and PAY people interest to save their USD in BitUSD.  THe reduced volatility and built in exchange combined with the demand for a real rate of return would drive liquidity of BitUSD to much higher levels that Bitcoin.  Merchants could accept BitUSD and all fees would be lower.

The idea of Bitcoin will live on and grow and mature. 

As for real things being purchased with Bitcoin... it is funding a ton of labor and my startup company to the tune of 6 figures by making it easy to move funds despite insane capital controls.

Hey what a refreshing perspective! I agree with you on many levels. I don't think Bitcoin is that difficult to use, with a fancy interface it could be possible! :)

We should expect "[ANN][WMC] WomanCoin" in the Alt-coins subforum pretty soon ;)

Only issue we face as a merchant selling internet services like vps servers for BTC is no auto recurring payments or subscriptions..  This means the client gets an invoice each month and has to make a btc payment to the account or pre-pay.

Honestly, my opinion is keen to yours. The economy is horrible.

I run my own business MyOwnAddress and I try to generate cheaper custom addresses for people I want to introduce into Bitcoin, but there currently is no easy way for them to acquire the Bitcoin to pay for it in the first place. The average person doesnt get paid, but to acquire their money, they don't need to go to MoneyGram and deal with a service who is horrible to work with, initiate a market trade, then export their money to a Bitcoin wallet (which in itself is an hour long transaction). Acquiring Bitcoin needs to be as easy as putting money into an ATM and getting Bitcoin out. It needs to be as easy as downloading a wallet app compatible with an ATM and then having the ATM directly send money to that wallet.

I also think confirmation time needs to be reduced.

Is that really true that historical returns of mining have been higher than outright buying of btc?

I have the impression it has been the inverse. Do you have more info on this?

Not really. I think the returns for a savy trader far outstrip that of a miner. I guess it would depend on many factors and your personal philosophy/skill level. The only absolute difference that I can see is when you mine at a pool you don't have to jump through the hoops of approval to deposit cash for a buy.

Great! I am thinking about so much, but I forgot the women ... women were it who made the web become web2.0, so - you are so right! how many women are on bitcointalk? One of hundred?

If you Google, you'll find various lists of bitcoin businnesses, some more helpful than others. Here's a useful one (http://mybitcoinadventure.devhub.com/directory-of-businesss-that-accept-bitcoin/) aimed at new adopters.

I personally think food is the  key. When people can buy groceries with bitcoins it will go mainstream - it's not just women who buy food :-).

Your link is broken...

First off iam a big BTC supporter but the economy is BEYOND PATHETIC and here's why in no particular order.  
1. A BTC atm/vending machine even tho they exist their isn't a single location anywhere in the world. i don't care about regulatory problems make it happen.
2. A service provider that makes it easy for the customer and merchant to do a transaction the provider should except the payment and then give the payment to the merchant at a later time.
3. Wells Fargo, paypal, google "thinking about" using BTC but not a single big company using it. If you had any doubt that big corps are run by establishment a holes here's your proof.
4. Volatility bitcoiners need to use BTC to buy that new car without going to fiat first. Car salesmen doesn't except BTC let him know that he lost a sale but whatever you do don't play their fiat game.
5. People selling to low it brings the price down and makes people that are not in BTC think of it as a joke and this means less adoption. What we need most in this area is stability of at least $100.
Bitcoin has more problems but i need to get back to work

I havent really been following the discussion but have a bit to add

Just saw Bitcoin ETF being mentioned on CNBC

Bright future ive been a bull since day one and that will never change

not to mention all the ATMs that are going to be in place,

New Money INCOMING!!!, Hold your bitcoins so that you can benefit from it

If women want to use bitcoin they they should do something about that, bitcoin is free and open source!  :)

Most women are more conservative and are not early adopters esp. not in technical fields. Bitcoin first has to be more mainstream for women to pour in.

To achieve that usability and accessibility has to improve.

And what suggestions do you have about such improvement?

I think there are some initiatives already underway.

If Bitcoincard gets finished it will be huge leap for adoption. The same for ATMs.

Maybe non-technical people will prefer bitcoin-banking services over holding the bitcoins themselves. (Not what I prefer though.)

I thought bitcoincard was already finished?

http://thebitcoincard.co.uk/

I really think a big improvement that could be made to Bitcoin would be either compressing the blockchain or removing old transactions from it.  If anyone wants to download a full client, it takes forever to download the blockchain initially.  The initial download took me three days, that was when it was 7 GB, it's since grown to 9 GB.  If I weren't such a geek, I'd have probably given up right there.  It's a big hit to usability to have such a long download time before you're even able to use a full client. 

I count around 40 businesses on that page.

That is a very good idea. However, how would one compress or remove old transactions at a constant rate while verifying that the Bitcoins in each wallet got there through valid means? Say we filter all transactions more than 21 days back? Couldnt someone just generate a wallet, fake a transaction with a timestamp of more than 21 days, and be able to spend those coins?

You've got a good point here, removing old transactions definitely reduces the transaction security.  You may not need to do both, after all, compression may very well be enough, at least for now.  After all, the blockchain is likely just text, so one should be able to achieve a pretty high rate of compression, say 90%, perhaps?  I haven't tried such a project before, so I don't know if that's possible, but if so, it would greatly reduce the amount of time needed to download the blockchain.  If such a compression ratio could be achieved, the blockchain size, or at least while downloading, could be reduced from about 9 GB to 0.72 GB, a significant savings.  Most people have hard drives big enough to hold the full blockchain, so it could always be uncompressed for verification, I think the bigger issue is the download time itself, although I could be mistaken.

Yes, I have to agree, the question doesn't matter.

Women will adopt Bitcoin when it is easier to use, but there are several steps the currency network needs to go through before that can happen. The interim steps are adoption by specialists in various fields, where the value that Bitcoin offers is greatest, and these are usually men.

Trying to get everyday women to jump into it now would be like if someone tried to get women to adopt the internet en masse in the 1980s when it was mostly just Bulletin Board Systems.

We need to focus on the steps in front of us, not those far in the future.

I was referring to this project:

http://bitcoincard.org/

I really hope they get it done soon.

So how do we get women to be part of our network, lots of men here on the forums and I know there are women(I made a funny comment that brought them out.)

The Female perspective is the only thing that will let us grow that demographic, we have to put our support behind whatever they want to create to reach that 50%.

So the question is, what do women want in Bitcoin?

probably get the women entrepreneurs out there now that are growing in numbers to adopt it, for example through sites like Etsy.

Thank you for this thread! I think the topic is crucially important!

I was at a peer to peer lending conference in NYC a couple weeks ago and tried to explain Bitcion to an institutional investor who had massive funds under management. He's heard of it before and really liked the concept after I told him some more details. The only questions he kept asking was if any major retailer is already accepting it. Even though Bitcoin requires some degree of explenation, everybody who can use a smartphone has sufficient technical abilities. So my view is, that's not the real problem.

If we want Bitcion not just to survive, but to become really succesfull (i.e. lots of transactions for goods and services) at least one of the major retailers or e-commerce businesses need to accept it. That will motivate an average non-tech person to use it as a means of payment. For this to happen, the big merchant which starts accepting Bitcoin must be one that suffers deeply under the current payment methods in financial terms. Can anyone here think of such a merchant? Ideally it would be one with international transactions because those have the highest fees longest durations. Such a merchant can also deal with services, it doesn't only have to be physical goods.

This brings me to financial services. Fees are generally high for all sorts of transactions and many people don't trust financial services firms and banks anymore. Currently many of the early Bitcoin adopters seem to regard it as an asset class. But if we can build a new type of financial services industry around it that leaves behind the mistakes of the current system it could also be a starting point to a larger adoption of Bitcoin.

Not directly.

But gift e-cards are one way to bridge between bitcoins and the fiat methods retailers and e-commerce already support.
 - http://bitcoinmoney.com/post/52164422060

Add up the 12,000 restaurants from Foodler, the retail locations from Gyft (http://app.gyft.com/me/cards/purchase/) (including Burger King, Marriott, CVS, Sears, Lowes, and a ton more), Amazon gift cards from GiftCardBTC.com, and then all the merchants where Dwolla can be used (which includes all the merchants with Lyoness, which accepts transfers from Dwolla) then you will have covered most every category with at least one merchant.    [Lyoness merchants include (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156968.msg1664676#msg1664676) Best Buy, Priceline, American AIrlines, Chevron, Exxon, Home Depot, Peet's Coffee, and many more]  

   
High Risk Merchant Accounts
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=73694.0


That's where the regulatory friction exists.  That's why BitSpend.net is currently offline.  That's why BillPayForCoins.com accepts bitcoins for only rent payments or for payments to your supplier (which they will manually verify to be true).  That's why GLBSE does not exist today.

But you are correct in that there are huge opportunities in finacial services for a Bitcoin.  Western Union should no longer need to exist.  A thousand bitcoin-powered M-PESAs should bloom.  Bitcoin-accepting ATMs could bring fees down to a fraction of current levels.     Bitcoins should be able to secure grams of gold held in a vault somewhere else.   Letters of credit for int'l commerce (http://falkvinge.net/2011/06/18/bitcoins-four-drivers-part-two-international-trade/) become trivial to obtain and use.

Dear Friend.

Hope all is great on your end.

Venezuela is currently (since 2002) under a very tight and restrictive currency exchange control. Thats why you hear little or nothing from us. The amount of foreign currency is limited by law. There is a 400 USD online limit (YEARLY) and a cap of 400 USD withdrawals of foreign currency in cash (only abroad) per month. All deals in foreign currency must be (indirectly, via the banks) approved by CADIVI (organism which controls the currency)

Its a tough nut to crack, yet, if venezuelans get more openminded and progressive (specially programmers) the growth of bitcoin in Venezuela promises to be spectacular. Lets hope this lid is opened soon and the ball gets rolling there soon. What bitcoin needs is the first country that massively and openly adopts it, and then the cycle re-ignite in a way more sustainable fashion.

And re "women are the answer":

Perhaps brothels in NV etc can accept bitcoin?

 :D

It's becoming a long thread, but it's very important and enlighting
I think looking back at how other paymet systems mad it work might be beneficial, like how credit cards became adopted?
Since bitcoin is open source might rethink the concept of an open source marketing department

Credit cards became adopted by finding the consumers, and offering them discounts.  Stores accepted the cards, and the hidden fees, because this meant high-income people would be more likely to buy from them.

In Bitcoin, most of the consumers are either dead, in hiding, or under arrest/investigation.

Bitcoin being under the radar for a while isn't a bad thing because the more the real bitcoin economy grows, the greater the countervailing force from regulators, banks and governments will be. Today bitcoin is a curiosity but when it hurts the profits of the existing establishment they will attack it and we need to be prepared for this.

I think one of the easiest things to do grow the real bitcoin economy is to use bitcoin in exchange. Even if you are a speculator you could toss a website a couple of coins or something. Growing the economy also means growing the community: preaching.

It will be for naught if we are not prepared for the inevitable government backlash though.

True, the amount of retailers which accept BTC is pretty big that way, but what it probably still lacks is transaction volume. However, the door is open. Now we all have to get going by using it and spreading the word.

Regulatory friction is mostly smaller outside the US. And probably the demand for more/improved financial services is probably larger outside the US. That's why I believe emerging markets are among the best opportunities to get BTC started on a larger scale. It might come to developed economies through the backdoor.

Letters of credit are also definitely worth a thought, good hint!

The push for smaller markets is basically a search for a cannon fodder that is willing to use a software that is non-compliant with any sort of accounting software guidelines, be it GAAP, IFRS or whoever else's.

"bitcoind" is well-nigh impossible to integrate with any existing transactional finance package that is using 3-phase commit protocol or any other customary reliability and accountability protocols.

My current best guess is that the adoption of Bitcoin will somewhat parallel the (non-)adoption of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Electronic_Transaction . Technically it was remarkably similar, e.g. use of dual-signatures instead of multi-signatures. It was also remarkably similar in the human-factor realm, that is the core cryptographic developers of SET displayed disdain and openly denigrated the needs of accountants and other operations personnel.

Thus SET was "adopted" by organizations that were already running into red ink as a way of spreading the responsibility for the failure and further muddying the accounts.

Obviously there can be no direct analogy for every aspect of SET and Bitcoin. Primarily because SET had high-level commercial sponsors from the outset and the whole budget of e.g. The Bitcoin Foundation is smaller than the fuel budget for a single private jet of any of the SET-sponsoring executives.

State of Bitcoin is flourishing

I'd put it more optimistically. Nobody is really "pushing" Bitcoin to be used in less regulated markets. It's just that in economies where the financial infrastructure is very limited or rudimentary Bitcoin might be a good opportunity to give more people access to financial services. When it happens, it will rather be a "pull" than a "push".

Regarding the compatibility with accounting standards, this might be the case today. But it is certainly possible to build more infrastructure around Bitcoin to actually make it compliant. Today already it is possible to build a sufficient accounting system around the Bitcoin client. To make it compliant with accounting standards would be the next step. The great thing is that everybody has access to a payment infrastructure that can have many more services built around it.

some bitcoin traders business etc have lost alot of money because they didn't follow through on the strategy,

any bitcoin or cyrptocurrency strategy should be atleast 5 years to see any kind of fruition and so far

everyone would have been a major success if they adopted this policy

The problem with calling this acceptance is most people won't go to the trouble of jumping through the hoops of buying a gift card just so that they can spend money on Amazon, unless they already own bitcoins and are looking for a way to spend it without cashing them out on an exchange.  It's not really true acceptance if you have to jump through these kinds of hoops.  I really think that the best thing that could happen to bitcoin would be for Amazon to start accepting it directly, but I doubt they'll go to the trouble with all the volatility that bitcoin has right now.

In general I agree with you: it is possible to integrate the official Bitcoin client with the  typical financial software. But:

1) the level of effort is tremendous

2) as of 0.8.3 the required effort is higher than it was at 0.3.23 when I looked at such integration for the first time. Then it was just BerkeleyDB which by itself is compliant with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open_XA . Now it added LevelDB which isn't compliant and in my estimation it won't ever be.

So the practical integration efforts will be limited to being in-effect manual processing and reconcillation. That will be acceptable probably only in businesses like e.g. mail order where the shipping is done at most once daily. Doing the accounting books "by hand" is essentially acceptable only to very small businesses and pretty much unheard of in a public company listed on an exchange.

Lots of the compliance can be faked without much effort, but such fakes sooner or later will be uncovered by the forensic accountants in a civil or criminal litigation. The chief distinction would be "is the non-compliant business big enough to be a profitable target for litigation" or to put in different way "will the possible damages, forfeitures, settlements, etc. cover the cost of billable hours for the lawyers and forensic accountants".

I'm not sure whether volatility is the problem. When you peg the BTC price to the USD or EUR so that it actually resembles your fiat currency the issue is manageable. You would need to exchange very frequently to fiat (like daily or so) in order not to be exposed to a massive FX risk but still I think a shop like Amazon could handle that.

I wonder whether it would be possible for Amazon and other large shops from an infrastructure point of view. Probably it would require quite a lot of work and resources to integrate Bitcoin into such a large business.

I think there is problem for using BTC as a medium of payment in daily life.

If I used 5 BTC to purchase a chair weeks ago,
and BTC rise from 100 USD to 200 USD,
now I want to refund for some reasons,
how many BTC could I get back?   ???

The key is development. The software engineers out there need to be working with entrepreneurs with capital so we can get more mobile apps, more interface. Interface is the reason btc is moving like it is, but it is spreading. I would love to drive around from business to business installing software from one store to customer. This is what we need. It will be a visa, mastercard, amex, and a BTC that is when the btc becomes more of a currency in the eyes of the public. Right now it is still taboo. Not known well enough.

Go forth, hold meetups. Ask every retailer/business if they accept bitcoin. Yes you may have been in on bitcoin since the beginning and want to see your btc increase so you make more money but if we do not spread this technology it will fail for not a lack of legitimacy but because a lack of movement.

I don't see the problem. Until bitcoin use is widespread enough for BTC prices to be stable, goods and services will continue to be priced in fiat currencies. So you'll pay based on a fiat price, converted to BTC, and when you get a refund you'll receive the fiat value, converted to BTC.

There's no other way it can work right now, but again, I don't really think it presents a real problem. If you don't want to risk losing your bitcoins, then every purchase made with bitcoins needs to be matched by buying more bitcoins to cover it, that's all.

This is the way! It has to start from the bottom because after all I think it's too hard to wait for someone like Amazon accepting. We all have to stat convincing small businesses accepting Bitcoin.

If there is anyone from Berlin here come join us for the Bitcoin Exchange Berlin on July 27. http://www.bitcoin-exchange-berlin.com/ (http://www.bitcoin-exchange-berlin.com/)

Try Inputs.io for that.