Bitcoin Forum

BitCoin certainly has a ways to go before mainstream adoption and acceptance.  We can cite numerous potential reasons for this, but what we actually need to do is determine what the real issues are blocking it and make steps to facilitate the growth of the BitCoin economy into mainstream sectors.

How can we stabilize it as a currency in terms of purchasing value?  What is a realistic estimate for it to stabilize at as a value?  How long do we have to capitalize on our current momentum to stabilize and cement it before the general market forgets about it and moves on?

What can be done to help both online & brick and mortar merchants accept it more widely?  What tools need to exist to flesh out the BitCoin economic ecosystem without imposing the banking models it was design to escape from?

What are the thresholds of acceptance that will propel it's acceptance at a faster rate?  What milestones will cause the non-Bitcoin economy to stand up and take the BitCoin seriously as a contender in the currency competition?  Are there are any other crypto-currency contenders in that space?

Is scalping doing too much damage to the reputation of BitCoin?  Has market volatility scared away too many investors?  If there is a threshold for failure, where is it?

What place will lending institutions hold in the new economy?  Will the lowered acceptance of fees result in increased interest rates for BitCoin loans or piggyback into lower acceptable interest rates from debtors?

What security options does BitCoin need to be as secure and seamless as possible?  What point is the limit for security vs. convenience?

As a community we need to inspect, understand, and address these issues if we hope to see results.  And realize this is just the surface -   BitCoin is for all intents and purposes a newborn, not yet even in it's infancy.  In order to survive in the harsh world of fiat currencies and precious metals and stocks, it's going to need good parenting and a plan.

I think the problem long term is that governments will try and destabilise it. They're scared of its potential for tax evasion and money laundering and will use their vast resources to destabilise to currency.

I don't think BitCoin is inherently drastically more prone to illegal use than say cash or commodities as a system of wealth transfer, although it is slightly simpler to use illegally.  That being said, the old guard will undoubtedly take steps through various governmental or financial channels to attempt to stop BitCoin as it represents a threat to their existing economic model - wherein they control the economy.

As a community we can do some things to help stem the blood flow from this, and even heal the wound that causes it.

The first is to educate the people we introduce to BitCoin about the ways in which it is similar to cash in that it can be used illegally, but the majority of it's use is for legitimate purposes.  Earlier is better on this one, sine the mainstream media has yet to really latch on to BitCoin as the next big scare for ratings.  The better educated people are (or can easily become) when that happens, the more foolish the old guard will look for trying to badmouth it.

I don't ever see mainstream wide adoption really.


You have to have an IQ over 60 really to use bitcoins.  That cuts about 50% of the population out right there.


that is unless maybe you could dumb it down enough to an iZombie app or something.

That's the defence that was used for p2p file sharing when it first emerged. People said it could be used legitimately and shouldn't be restricted just because of the illegitimate users. I think Bitcoin probably has more legitimate uses than Napster did (for example) which counts in its favour, but I think there'll be difficulty persuading the public at large that Bitcoin is legitimate especially when the media will undoubtably be whipping up a storm about Bitcoin being used for drug pushers and child pornographers.

I have tried explaining what bitcoin is and how it works to my friends a numerous amount of times, and I find it near impossible, even though I am such a well-spoken and smart person. The only way I can explain bitcoins to anyone that I know is by dumbing it down to the point where it doesn't even seem interesting.

If you don't ever see mainstream adoption as happening, why are you interested in BitCoins?


This is only the case now - not indefinitely.


I laughed, but this would actually be a huge help to it's adoption.  This goal is probably best served by the open source community developing a standard BitCoin library (let's call it bitCoinLib) for other developers to implement with little or no restriction on it's inclusion in a software project, thereby being available easily on as many platforms as possible.  In this way the BitCoin community can easily spread to anyone with a device that can run software including the bitCoinLib and thereby increase the user base drastically.

The only restrictions I could see for use of bitCoinLib would be open source final products to facilitate transparency, and free final products, excepting BTC fees taken which must be added entirely to the mining pools rewards through the protocol's optional fee system (to match the BitCoin protocol's ideals of lowered fees and costs to users of the currency, one of it's main selling points).

edit history
-fixed a typo interest to interested

I don't ever see or hope for a mainstream adoption either. I do hope that it adapts better and gets easier to use for its current users and maybe grow a tad more to stimulate the community. But other than that, I wouldn't mind if everyone didn't know about it.

The more people who adopt BitCoin, the greater the value.  Therefore it is inherently contradictory to to not hope for mainstream adoption, and want it to appreciate.  As an extension of this logic, everyone knowing about it increases the value the greatest amount, as well as providing incentive for people to create more and better clients for BitCoin use.

So again, why are you interested in BitCoin?

I'm interested in Bitcoin for purchasing with anonymity. Value does not matter to me completely*, keeping my identity hidden behind this computer is.

Edited for mistake*.

I think it will always be a niece market to some extent. It's never going to become a mainstream payment method for Joe Public. However, there's still massive opportunity for increased adoption. Right now Bitcoin really is a geeky thing. Nobody outside techie circles has heard of it. It's slowly starting to permeate the mainstream financial news and as press coverage increases, we can expect much more growth as investors with a penchant for high risk / high gain investments put their money into it.

Why do you think this?


That's certainly a hurdle, but I don't think it's insurmountable.


Agreed.  But what indicators point to the this being a finite point before mass adoption?  What prevents BitCoin from becoming a "real" (so to speak) currency?  As more investors show exposure to BitCoin, why would it not eventually reach a critical mass of sorts and cascade into mainstream adoption?

I just had a conversation with someone who runs a consumer-to-consumer used-auto listing service.  

Normally there are all kinds of problems with trust for both sides of the process.  

The seller takes a big risk in letting the potential buyer test drive the car, for instance.  I suggested that bitcoins could be used to help increase the likelihood that the potential buyer returns with the vehicle.  Having an escrow agent, such as BTCrow.com in the middle, for instance would help to protect both parties.

Additionally, showing up with a pocketful of cash to a location of the seller's choosing makes many buyers uneasy.  With bitcoin and a smartphone the buyer needn't carry cash at all.   If everything checks out, the buyer can complete the purchase on-the-spot.

These are two examples of niche uses for bitcoin that aid certain types of commerce.  They are examples that show how Bitcoin can help improve our lives.

These two examples are, to reiterate your statement, "just the surface".

Yep I get the same puzzled looks.. and the older crowd is like 'but its not money you cant hold it'  - And to other poster I am all for spreading the word , and do so - going to pitch the idea to small business association locally some time soon, but really you don't need mainstream appeal to be successful. To me its a small gamble, always have multiple horses int he race they say...

Look at gold .. 90 to 95% (maybe higher) US citizen has no idea that gold is money, even after this run from 250 to 1900 .. there just isn't wide mainstream appeal, but hey I would say that isn't such a bad thing it has worked out very well for me.  i fell bitcoin may be similar as time goes on.

 Kinda like the apple stock holder arguments to me "i'm up 400%!!!" ..but yeah everything you buy costs 500% more.. you lost, after taxes, well lets not even go there such deep thoughts lol

It's very difficult to go from cash to bitcoin.  The "common man" has no patience for this.  Hash, blocks, all this nonsense...normal people simply don't care.

Bunch of reasons why it'll struggle for mainstream acceptance (which isn't necessarily to say it'll never get there):

1.  Lack of accessibility.  Any time you want to use it you have to install software and download the whole block-chain.  Thin clients/online wallets may ease this - but going the wallet route just makes it a bit like an amateurish Paypal where you don't get seller protection AND there's a decent chance of the wallet stealing your money.

2.  A (somewhat deserved) reputation for most services being scammers or amateur.  Not a show-stopper and, as more reliable services become available, this will become less of an issue.

3.  Lack of stability in value.  The mainstream doesn't want a currency which has 20%+ swings in value in a day.  This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation - as it becomes more mainstream it'll become more stable.

4.  Difficult to transfer to/from fiat currency without paying hefty margins and/or having lengthy delays.

5.  The perception that anyone can make a currency like bit-coin (see ixcoin etc).  This is a false perception imo (anyone can make a currency but getting it used and having value is nothing like so simple).

Just a few quick thoughts on it. 

For now the best practice solution is to run a full-fledged client on a trusted machine you control physical access to, and remotely VNC to it over the Internet as securely as possible.  While (even perfect) online wallets are a solution, they are inelegant and contrarian to the decentralized/low-overhead goals of the protocol.  After I post, I'll start a thread on using VNC as an alternative near-universal mobile client from a smartphone or laptop.


This can be simply overcome by creating more legitimate businesses using BTC.  While this isn't a short-term solution, in the long-term it outweighs the scammers in terms of public opinion.  Pushing for immediate growth in the legitimate sector will go far on this front to expedite the process.  Invest in businesses that use BitCoins well and promote them through their affiliate programs.  This is an area we can and should move aggressively on when possible.


This problem is will be addressed via distributed bot that acts as a price bloc.  Please read and comment on my thread at:
bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39792.msg485421#msg485421


This problem will potentially be self-correcting as more individuals are in a position to trade BitCoins with people they know in real life.  Many BitCoin users now only know of people online to trade them with.


I'm not sure this is an actual hurdle to BitCoin - there's a strong argument to be made that acceptance of one crypto-currency (at least partially) supports acceptance of all crypto-currencies.

1.  We're talking about mainstream acceptance.  That's not gonna come if everyone has to:
a) Have an always on computer running VNC or similar on a permanent connection.
b) Have that computer solely used by them - leaving an unencrypted wallet on a running machine used by others wouldn't be smart.
c) Either carry around another device with VNC installed AND internet connectivity or somehow be able to use VNC on other people's machines.

I'm not knocking it as a work-around for some of us - but it's not a mainstream solution.  There ARE mainstream solutions -but what you propose isn't one.

2.  We're in agreement this is an issue - but not one which can be overcome.  To an extent this issue is actually the result of other ones.

3.  Read your thread.  Seems to be suggesting tieing up about 15% of the value of all BTC in existence with zero return - with them only ever being used if BTC totally crashes at which point that US$ could well be significantly devalued.

Plus my point was about stablity - your thread is about guaranteeing some minimum value which would do nothing to encourage stability at higher exchange rates.  Fundamentally you can only prop up a currency's value by taking a loss - I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess you weren't actually offering to tie up $21m of your own.  Artificial manipulation of bitcoin value by (what would be in effect) some central reserve bank is totally against the whole principles seperating bitcoin from fiat currencies.  The correct way for stability to arrive is by increasing bitcoin trade such that speculation and scams are no longer the main drivers in the market.

4.  I agree in theory.  Right now there's few reasons associated with legitimate businesses to want bitcoins rather than US$ (speculation, trading and Silkroad spring to mind as amongst those few).  For bitcoins to go mainstream there need to be reasons why buying with them is better than with fiat.  There's no real incentive whilst many merchant who take bitcoins are just selling at a prive that's higher than fiat (by the margin they pay to get the BTC straight back into fiat on MtGox).

5.  I agree this isn't much of an issue to you or me - but to the mainstream it's not so obvious why bitcoins can have value when anyone can just make their own similar currency up overnight.

Oh - and in the thread you linked re: point 3 you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding.  You're talking about "price" - whereas I was referring to "value".

To quote your thread:

"As an example, let's say you wanted to stabilize the price (ratio) at 1$:1BTC for all eternity - they would simply place a $21,000,000 bid at 1$ on MtGox.  As a result the price cannot go below 1$."

Your conclusion (price cannot go below $1) is correct - but totally meaningless.  It's VALUE that matters.

And your earlier point that it would stabilize the price at $1:1BTC is just plain wrong.  It would keep the price at or above $1:1.

If everyone else in the world believed bitcoins were worth less than $1 then yes - they'd never trade below $1.  But you'd end up owning every accessible bitcoin with noone willing to buy them back from you: as value requires both a buyer AND a seller (whereas price just needs a seller).  So ultimately you'd achieve the "goal" of bitcoins never falling below $1 - at the cost of you ending up out of pockey by (up to) $21m and holding a wallet full of bitcoins that noone would buy (unless .you dropped your price - but if you did that then you'd not have achieved anything at all).

Value != Price

Sorry, I should have phrased that better - there is no way to regulate value unless you can regulate the value of all existing currencies with 100% accuracy, and that is probably impossible.

There is a lot of good discussion back and forth on this thread and some good points too.

To my thinking there is just one main hurdle above all others:

Legal - Bernard von Nothaus was convicted of counterfeiting US money because he issued pure silver dollars that superficially 'looked' like US circulated coins. (How you can counterfeit something that's worth more than the real thing is beyond me.) What it boiled down to was competition from private currencies against the US Dollar from within the US. Once there is a large enough user base OR some random criminal is caught in some Bitcoin sting then you will see the media criticism ramp up and the attacks will begin against Bitcoin.

The current administration in Washington has made repeated statements, quite recently, that the President needs the ability to "shutdown" the internet. The President also has wide emergency powers. A President could be persuaded, perhaps by Treasury or Fed officials, that this Bitcoin is a threat to the economy. The President could declare it illegal and direct ISP's to filter, block and report all Bitcoin traffic.

Granted, this is an extreme scenario -- these are extreme times however. The fact remains: until we have a legal, competitive currency structure any virtual currency will face hurdles to mainstream acceptance.

The needs of the masses are already met by existing payment methods (cash, credit/debit cards, Paypal etc). Bitcoin is more complex than these methods which hill hamper adoption and it's only useful in niche circumstances (anonymous transfers, micropayments with little fees).

Do you think bitcoin being illegal would destroy it entirely? People do plenty of illegal things and there are plenty of people with the need for bitcoin. I guess it would hinder its acceptance into mass use though...

I agree with the various problem already debated. I think there are also some other concerns (or rather, some questions), not just for mainstream acceptance but also for "computer people" acceptance. Maybe they are trivial and I shouldn't worry about those, but still I didn't find any crystal-clear answer to those:

1) Looks like I'm not the only wondering this. As far as I understood the difficulty is adjusted given the hashrate power of the network, so adjusting it needs a measure of blockcount (every client has it, afaik) and time (potentially different from a client to another - needs some kind of a central authority - who is this?)

2) Is there someone or a few people controlling the core of the network? If no, then why does it seem so hard to set up a test network (I think I read about that in some developer/debugging thread)? If yes, who? and how do we know this won't stop running at some point?

NB: I know every Bitcoin ad I see (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39886.0) says "no central authority", but they always forget to explain (even briefly) how it is possible to achieve this...

3) As far as I understood: blocks and all transactions are stored in the blockchain, which is duplicated on all clients. What happens when/if there's a mass adoption and, say, 100M transactions a day (yeah, not likely to happen any time soon, but that's what they said about year 2000 when they were happily storing dates in 2 digits in the 1980s). More generally, will that thing scale (very) well?

Sorry again if this looks like newbie questions (but hey that's the newbie section after all ;)), but I really think clear answers to those may help to convince more tech-aware people to try BTC (or not ^^), which is a first step before going for mainstream acceptance.

There's no fundamental need for every single node to store the whole blockchain. That's what happens at the moment, however if the blockchain gets so large that this becomes unfeasable, then new clients can be written that allow some nodes to only have a small subset of the blockchain to fulfil their needs, and a smaller number of supernodes can deal with the whole blockchain.

Part of the problem with a currency that is suspected to gain value is that people are less willing to spend it.  I think people would be more willing to accept it as a currency if it made some attempt to maintain a constant value instead of an increasing value.

Also, the amount of time it can take for transactions isn't practical.  So, between the awkward waiting persiods and forced scarcity I think people will find it hard to accept as a day to day currency.

Major problems include:

- The fact that transactions can be tracked by software
- Anonymity where you don't need it and lack of anonymity where you do
- Inability to instantly verify a transaction
- No strong infrastructure behind it, and when such infrastructure is in place, a lot of the the things which BitCoin is supposed to be that other currencies are not goes away
- BitCoin seems to be popular with the unscrupulous
- BitCoin policy seems to be mostly managed by a fringe political group
- BitCoin suffers from increasing uncertainty of its circulation over time, which results in decreased valuation

With all that said, BitCoin does have some viable opportunities in the third world if instant transactions can be developed for the cell phone market.

Need to get Walmart to accept btc and resell the ones they get.  They could accept then online for purchases and giftcards (so you wouldn't have to wait for confirmations for your purchases in store)

Yeah, that's actually a major issue IMO, and the worst part of that problem is: it seems that a lot of people very involved in BTC think that this on the contrary is a strength. This can even be read it the FAQ (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#But_if_no_more_coins_are_generated.2C_what_happens_when_Bitcoins_are_lost.3F_Won.27t_that_be_a_problem.3F) (not with those words, but that seems to be the idea): "don't worry, there won't be inflation but rather deflation, it's a great thing". No, it's not. If BTCs keep gaining value, clinging to your BTCs instead of spending them is actually a profitable investment. Since I don't think anyone will put all their money or even the majority of their money into BTC, noone will be forced to spend them, ie it's possible that everyone just cling to their BTCs. How useful is a currency if noone is willing to spend it? Real world money keeps losing 1-2% value every year, and when you think about it, that's definitely a strong incentive to either spend it or invest it, and not to keep it dormant in your safe like you'd do with, say... gold? Which leaves to my next question: are you guys willing to create another currency or to create another gold?
If you're willing to create another gold, then there's a problem: real gold actually has an intrinsic value, ie it is required to build some electronics components, and lots of people women ;D want jewelry made of gold. The same is not true of BTCs. BTCs serve no component-building purpose nor decorative purpose. If all the BTCs of the world end up in a forgotten stash on a forgotten hard drive, noone will miss it. At best maybe someone will create another BTC-like e-currency.

I'm actually mining at the moment, but have no plan of selling or spending my BTCs any time soon...

Increasing value is a problem, but I can't think of any good way to solve it.  They need to be percieved as limited in number because they have no value otherwise.  Miners don't need both an increasing difficulty and decreasing value of thier product over time.  I'm planning on selling games for SC/BTC, but i suspect I'll have to sell them for less than they're worth in those currencies because customers will factor in the currencies potential when deciding to exchange for goods.  Still, I love the idea of cryptocurrency, so I'm going to give it a shot.

I think we are still reeling from the silk road stuff and other quasi-illegal/scamming stuff that has hit the presses. 

Unfortunately I dont think we are going to hit mainstream for a very long time, we are just finding out that our main spokesperson very well may be a long time fraudster and bitcoin is his next target!!!

Mainstream will accept BTC once it is more stable. Maybe their should be different types of BTC?

So the hurdle to mainstream acceptance...is mainstream (Walmart) acceptance.....

Bitcoin© should cooperate with the police in order to capture and punish those who exploit Bitcoin©.

lol at the last post, but really. i have bitcoins yet i cant spend them. im unable to contact the person on the forum who i want to send money. should we not have a market place that anyone can use if they have the coin?

I will just answer the question "what are the major hurdles for acceptance by me?", because I can not speak for the mainstream.
For each hurdle I will also give my proposals how to overcome the current problems.
I hope that these ideas will lead to better adoption of BTC by the mainstream.


1st hurdle: Security.

Nobody wants to loose his money.

  a) Online wallets and exchanges which store users wallets need to install security measures like currently only banks have, in particular: Strong access protection, redundant data storage, physical protection of servers against all sorts of attacks and other hazards.

  b) Wallet encryption finally has arrived with the new BTC client. However other clients (e.g. multibit) have to follow and also implement wallet encryption.

  c) Still open is the question how to prevent loss of coins and secure storage of the keys in a redundant manner. BTC clients should better support this, see also my proposal e).

  d) Also the problem of providing an untampered, secure system to run the BTC client on should be handled such that it is easier to use. I recommend that together with the BT client one can get a complete live CD distribution of a secure environment like e.g. linuxcoin or ct bankix. However, these distributions should be very easy to install even for non-techies.
Of course the best way would be that the BTC client is programmed so nifty that it can even run in unsecure, hostile environments (keyloggers, trojans etc.) and all attacks are deflected or at least lead to security alerts (think of electronic banking with SMS TAN verification). However it seems that today this is a technology not yet within reach.

 
2nd hurdle: Money should also be __simple__ and low-tech.

Take a look at history. Money has always been something simple, something you could touch (with the exception of today's fiat currencies and electronic bank accounts).

  e) All BTC clients should support importing and exporting of wallet keys and addresses in a __standardized__ way, preferably as paperkeys. This allows users to conveniently store their money without depending on a specific BTC client (version), a specific operating system, a specific wallet encryption / storage method, a specific file system, a specific physical storage device. Also it allows users to exchange bitcoins like normal cash, just exchanging pieces of paper, no need for highly sophisticated electronic devices.
 To me, money also should offer the possibility to be __simple__.

 
3rd hurdle: Ease-of-use of the BTC clients.

Transferring money should have a similar look-and-feel like a standard electronic banking GUI or credit card payment. This includes to optionally get rid of the BTC currency (at least in the GUI) if the user so wishes.
In the end, consumers should be able to look at the BTC client like at the GUI of any other electronic banking. So a consumer finally can choose to use the BTC client because he trusts the service of the "BTC crowd banking" more than the service of the established banks.
Ironically this can lead to a situation where a consumer forgets that he is using BTC as a backbone.

  f) BTC clients should offer the possibility to display the balance in any currency the user likes.

  g) BTC clients should offer the possibility to choose the currency for a money transfer in any currency that the user chooses for the specific transfer.

  h) BTC clients should display the transaction history with the specific currencies that the user selected for the specific money transfer.

  i) BTC clients should have an interface to a crowd-based currency exchange mechanism like e.g. ripple. This way the user is not forced to get into the details of currency exchange. This is like using credit card payments in a foreign country: You do not bother about the details, you should pay in the currency you are requested to and the rest is done by the payment system itself. Of course one can think to incorporate online exchanges etc, but personally I prefer to as much keep the concept of distributed crowd services, because it minimizes possible attack vectors against single weak points (and online exchanges have abundantly prooved to be single weak points, even without mentioning past centralized systems like e-gold which were shut down by the governments)   


4th hurdle: Instantaneous payment when dealing face-to-face.

  j) BTC clients should integrate mechanisms like e.g. vouchersafe or OpenTransactions to make instantaneous payment possible.

It's really just a matter of time.  There has been a lot of good publicity around bitcoin, but that was followed with a lot of not so good stuff.  Awareness is the #1 hurdle, now longevity has to be the goal.  The system just makes too much sense not to be adopted sometime, but it has to be battle tested over a longer period of time.

What are the major hurdles you feel BitCoin faces to mainstream acceptance?

easy: 1/3 who use bitcoins getting ripped off.

Mainstream acceptance is not "just a matter of time". I think freemoney458 raised lots of valid points, most notably the lack of simplicity. At the moment, I see no reason for the average user to choose BTC over, say PayPal. Getting BTCs is a hassle-full process, where every middleman takes their small percentage. In the end doing a transaction in BTC costs more both in term of money and time. Only miners, gamblers/daytraders and drug dealers can find the system interesting ATM...

Once it is integrated into a credit card type form then eveyrone could use it.

Exactly, there aren't any major technical roadblocks.  Once the ease of use is there and the reputation for security is established the many other advantages of bitcoin over other forms of currency will shine through with time.

I believe this is the biggest issue with bitcoin's acceptance right now. There's a catch-22 in which, as the currency gains in acceptance, it also goes way up in value. As it goes way up in value, it is perceived (rightly so) as unstable, making it less attractive to being accepted in the first place.

Sure, we have merchants out there accepting bitcoins for payment, but almost nobody is *pricing* in bitcoins. That's because it's so obvious to everyone that the value of bitcoins is a big question mark. You would have to be pretty bold to price your goods on your store in bitcoins and then go to bed, when overnight the value could fall 50% and somebody could buy out your entire store at half price.

I suspect we could do better, but we are going to have to let go of the "fixed-number-of-coins" love affair that we currently have going on. I'm just as much of a libertarian-leaning gold-standard Austrian nut as the next bitcoin guy, but I think in this case we need to see past the fixed-number-of-coins limitation. Slowly people are starting to catch on. Over in the Alternate Cryptocurrencies forum there's a proposal for "EnCoin" -- somebody's idea of how to design a coin which targets a number of KWH worth of electricity as it's value. That proposal may or may not work, it's got a lot of details to hash out.

We could also have a coin that targets a number of ghash as it's value, by simply having the number of coins per block be proportional to the difficulty of the block and never capping the number of coins. We may also need to have transaction fees that are destroyed or something similar to keep some upward pricing pressure; I haven't worked out all the details, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why this or something like it wouldn't work.

People say that nobody will adopt such a coin because it cannot promise to make them rich. I say, the promise of making you rich is exactly why bitcoin took off with early adopters AND is exactly what holds it back from more mainstream types. We have to let go of getting rich off the currency. That's the whole problem with govt-backed currencies anyway -- some minority gets rich off the currency at the expense of everyone else. Bitcoin is no better in this regard, but we CAN do better.

Thank you for pointing this out.
Currently, I see too many people around that just try to get rich quick with Bitcoin.

As a fellow libertarian and Austrian economics fan, I can just say:
The advantage of using Bitcoin should not be getting rich on the expenses of others.
There is nothing wrong with getting rich, just take care that you respect your fellows on this planet.
The idea of getting rich off a currency is wrong and is exactly what lead to bank-controlled economies on this planet with enormous misplacement of human energy in all economic fields.

Instead, the advantage of using Bitcoin is to save money and effort by not enriching people which control the currency.
And Bitcoin is the only currency (apart from gold) that can not be controlled.

So, to summarize:

Fundamental hurdle for Bitcoin:
That people perceive it as a way to get rich on the expense of others.

+1

Many people use cash for day-to-day transactions, but the majority of USD and other currencies is stored by financial institutions that provide protection and insurance of one's funds.  If Bitcoin were to have such protection and insurance, its utility would greatly rise.

They can insure the funds, because they can print more money to pay it back anytime. The problem is that when the print more money, it's only taking the value from existing money in circulation rather than creating out of thin air like you would want to believe. It's only redistributing wealth that people already had which was stored in pre existing money in circulation. Bitcoin you don't need the insurance of people's wealth paying back the money because the value already comes from the trust among the people who use bitcoin. If you want to keep it safe, then you simply need to back up the file properly instead of trusting another person or corporation to hold you money and loan it to others at interest.

Yeah, I actually come from a far more leftist point of view than what seems like most bitcoin users.  As a socialist/communist I think bitcoin is perfect for really allowing everyone to understand how wealth is distrubuted and how inequality manifests itself.  

You can't actually achieve equal wealth distribution when new phony wealth is being created out of thin air.

You do realize that the banks of the US pay the FDIC insurance premiums on their deposits so that their depositors can have insurance, and insurance payouts come from that pool, right?  Yes, the US could potentially inflate the dollar to worthlessness, but that's now how deposit insurance works at all.

We need a MAJOR Porn distributor (Vivid, etc) to start accepting bitcoins. That will do the trick.

I am not even joking. What we need right now is to bring on the "bad guys" onto the damn scene as the price of $5 is killing me !!!

Lol, most likely indeed... Come get sum!  ;D