Bitcoin Forum

I first heard of bitcoin when the silk road website hit the news. I poked around a bit, thought it sounded interesting, but it was way too soon to make any serious judgement. I meant to keep some tabs on it and see what happened, but it fell off my personal radar.

It was brought back to my attention when the link aggregate website I used made a passing reference to the troubles bitcoin has seen over the last month. Double so when the article it linked referenced pattaya- Where I currently live and work. So I've spent two days running through these forums and other new material. I have a lot of personal opinions, but I'm not looking to start a flamewar.

What I have is a single question- one that in two days, I've only seen one website attempt to address, and even then it was given very perfunctory treatment. Why bitcoin? The bitcoin FAQ assumes I understand this, or skips it.

 I'm Joe Average. I buy things online, predominately off Amazon, occasionally Newegg or Ebay. I have a paypal account, but I rarely use it- Really, only for Ebay. Either way, I have never run into a problem with either my bank, or paypal.

It seems like there is no real discussion- It's assumed that the people who read bitcoin websites understand the need for bitcoin. Or there is just no need to explain to others why bitcoin is superior to using a bank/credit/paypal system. There is a phrase I've seen used in probitcoin comments on articles. "Bitcoin will change the world" What I'm asking here is for clarification. Why/How?

On the wiki, there is a short section devoted to the question of Why bitcoin- but the points made feel.. debatable and a touch hastily done. I'm not sure I see the value in irreversible transactions, for instance. I like the idea that if something goes wrong, I can dispute charges relying on something more then the good nature of whatever person now has my money.

So I'm wondering if anyone here would like to explain the benefits for the average member of the public to use bitcoin rather then actual hard currency, or the current paradigm of credit and debt for online purchases?

I realize this sounds like trolling or baiting for a reaction, but this is a legitmate question, that I would like to discuss.

As strictly a consumer you are currently paying a premium (let's say 5% on average) above what the goods could cost if Bitcoin was the payment system used since it does not rely on some of the archaic thinking that has led us to the banking system we have today.

It's similar to how the Internet brought everyone cheap publishing abilities.

If you want to be a small time merchant, there's nothing that comes even close to being able to rival Bitcoin in low startup costs and overhead.

Decentralized - there is no central authority over bitcoin.

No one can print more bitcoins when the limit of 21mil is hit.
No one can stop you from sending your bitcoins to someone else (wikileaks being a popular example)
No ridiculous fee's (other than 1 cent or whatever (believe it's even lower) for transaction fee) for sending someone money.

There isn't really any big advantage for the regular person other than that there's basically no fee's.

Pretty sure there are other reasons to use bitcoins, but those 3 are probably the most important things.

Well, let's see...

1) first and foremost, reversible transactions open up a wonderful new world of petty fraud, especially for companies selling digital, ephemeral products (such as ebooks, or software, or online services) because delivery of those is problematic to prove outside some pretty in-depth interpol investigation.

I can trivially buy a PDF from your online store, rip it, then claim you never delivered. Paypal specifically will nearly always side with the buyer.

As you might guess, that makes people selling digital products and services online very very sad.

Also, if you are a freelance artist, for instance, I could pay you with paypal P2P, then reverse the transaction after I receive your artistic work. Good luck proving act of delivery to Pain Pal.

2) Paypal specifically arbitrarily restricts countries to/from which transactions can be made. Since I am from [REDACTED], that sucks balls.

3) Fees for online payment systems (especially credit card ones) are relatively complex and high. Bitcoin fees are pretty low, especially if you don't need transaction to be confirmed ASAP

4) There are legitimate reasons to be unwilling to expose your personal information to some third party, for instance:

• some people happen to live in police states you know. Not the kind of police state Americans like to cry about, the "they check your documents on the street, ze horar, ze horar". The kind of where you get arrested and beaten (possibly to the death), then jailed (in case you were not beaten to the death) for running an unlicensed wifi AP
• After the Sony fiasco, even a legitimate customer of a legitimate business in a fluffy happy free country  should think twice before exposing personal details to said business, especially so if the business is technically not subject to fluffy happy country's jurisdiction

5) Bitcoin is decentralized and thus quite resilient to local outages, be they due to State meddling, criminal agents, or natural events. That's a huge boon.

Other three simple scenarios that I experienced myself with the current broken banking systems:

* Friend wants to buy some thing online - only 1 left in stock. Friend asked me for some money until his next paycheck - we were not in the same town then, so no cash option for us. Since it was a saturday, he could not buy the item then and had to pay +30% a week later.

* I wanted to send some money to a friend in another country. The fees? 30 EUR + 2%. Time? 2+ working days.

* Since I'm from Romania, my debit cards were not accepted online in a lot of places, so I had to go get a "real" credit card - with more than 4 times the fees.

And so on...

I understand that reversing charges can be used for petty fraud- but bitcoin is also vulnerable to fraud, is it not? The difference is who is the victim. With paypal, merchants have to worry about petty fraud, sure. What I'm seeing with bitcoin is the potential for the consumers to be scammed instead. At the same time, Its that much harder to deal with these scams- I'm sure fighting paypal on a reversed charge is an unpleasant, uphill battle, but if I send say, send 3k USD worth of bitcoins to someone for a custom watch that never manifests I have no recourse at all. The problem isn't with PayPal siding with customers, It's in people out to make a dishonest quick buck.

I've never paid a fee for my credit card. I've always paid the balance in full each month. Maybe I've lucked out.

I follow that you don't want others to have your personal information. I can even support that. My problem is not knowing where the money goes once it's gone. If I pay for goods that aren't provided, I want more then a bitcoin address/username to pursue matters with the seller, or to give to a law enforcement/fraud monitoring organization.

 I really hadn't considered using bitcoin as an alternate to western union. I could see some potential there, were it not for the fact the people I western union money to can barely be trusted to operate an email account.

I'm not an economist, so I don't immediately grasp what you are meaning by archaic thinking that results in higher prices. I'm assuming you don't mean anything related to processing fees for credit cards?

I do. Next time you buy something from a local store owner whom you believe own their own business, ask them how much they have to pay in fees to be able to accept credit cards. Do the math on how that affect their profit margins on low cost items.

Those fees are passed on to you, the consumer.

I am aware of those fees, I've known a couple small business owners. But for those fees to disappear- That would require bitcoin being adopted to a universal standard in which these businesses did not need to process credit cards at all. So me, as a consumer wouldn't see this particular benefit until the 'why bitcoin' question in this thread became a moot point.

Look up Credit Card Merchant fees. Visa and Master Card siphon 2 1/2% out of the economy.
The main reason for BTC is the are basically electronic cash with a transfer network controlled by no one. They are not counterfeitable.
The #2 reason is the BTC is more secure than any other electronic transfer of data bar none.

You speak about paypal in your thread.

That alone is a GOOD reason to use bitcoin. Why? Fees, account closing, chargebacks and whatelse...

Technically, giving someone $3000 in Bitcoins isn't different from sending someone them via Western Union - there are still traces for law enforcement to pursue, but more often than not, when your $3000 via Western Union has departed, it is departed as surely as if it was Bitcoin.

Also, assuming you take care and do due diligence (as you would probably do before forking over a large sum in plain dead tree USD cash) the scammer has to invest a lot of effort to build up a profile to deceive you (hard), while a reverse-transaction scam requires the scammer either to have many fake-ID paypal accounts (easy) or do the scams relatively rare (easy).

Basically, think of bitcoins as cash that can be forked over via internet.

Doing something with bitcoins that you would not have done with dead tree dollars is not advisable.

And I am somewhat dubious as to where would losses go if someone scams a person for 3000$ via paypal and those 3000$ are already out of scammer's account by the time fraud complaints are filed (there are ways to rapidly cash paypal out without exposing yourself to LEAs. They cost dearly, but the scammer is likely ready to pay a significant portion of his illegally earned money to pull them out of paypal ASAP)

Would Paypal still reverse it and suck up the damage ?


It might be dependent on how your bank works, but where I live online transactions, even with "propper" credit cards (not debit ones) and not resulting in any overdraft shenanigans, are still subject to a special "card not present risk fee".

Sorry for the intrusion. Another newbie here. I originally heard of bitcoin something like a year ago, but I didn't have any money to put into it then. I kind of wish I had. But that's the past. I was reading this thread, and I have to say I've had the same question as the premise, and you guys seem to have some answers, so I figured I'd ask here.

I do have a couple of questions, though. I'm halfway decent at understanding finance, despite being a relative layman, and there are some things I wa wondering about.


I agree that bitcoin is supposed to be decentralized in theory, but it really seems to me that a very large amount of traffic and funding is in the hands of a very small number of exchanges. If one goes down (and they have periodically) then the market is shaken, and could easily crash completely. You get enough money into one exchange, and it goes down because of black hats or poor planning or what have you, a lot of people could be ruined.

So it actually seems quite centralized in practice, and that concerns me.


This is another thing. Inflation is a constant thing. It always has been, and without artifical devaluation of currency, it always will be. Without regulatory bodies presiding over bitcoin to artificially control values (which we all know will never happen), then once the limit of 21 million is hit, prices can only go up. It's a system that favors early adopters and wealthy people far too heavily to make me comfortable.


This I actually completely agree with. Companies and governments should never be able to tell you how you want to spend your money, so long as it's a legal action. And while I'm sure somewhere out there are people using bitcoin for illegal purposes, that's not a valid indictment of the currency as a whole, as many more people use USD for criminal activities.

The fees are slightly different, usually they are charged because the centralized authority has hundreds of employees to pay living wages. I don't know how the exchanges work, but I'm assuming that they're mostly low-employee operations. Please, correct me on that if I'm wrong.

Anyway, I am interested, but I admit a little wariness, and would like more information before I jump. Thanks!

That's the point- Bitcoins really don't offer any security against scammers. Paypal has flaws, but bitcoins don't offer leaps and bounds of improvements. Also just noting that due diligence is hard in a younger community like bitcoin merchants. Easy to get into, easy to run with a profit.  

In addition to the arguments above, here's a little anecdote.

My wife is a banker and having seen the innards of the dominating system, she's always been supportive about the idea of a free method of value transfer (we made an unsuccessful attempt to make use of Ripplepay before). She was very enthusiastic when we first found out about Bitcoin last year, but never had a motive to use the currency herself. Last Friday, she opened a VoIP account and made the transfer using Bitcoin. She was more than impressed, which made me realize again how awesome the system actually is. Since then we've been shopping online and having lots of fun.

I guess the main reason we get this liberating feeling is that banks have always been problematic for us. Credit cards getting cancelled for "security" reasons (like having used them "abroad"), passwords getting locked, having to actually travel to the banks for various proofs of identity, ridiculous measures of security (like having to have a mobile phone registered in the coutry where the bank is) and of course account fees, card fees, and whatnot. On top of that, since we are expatriates, letters of credibility are requested which we need to get from banks from where we have citizenship. Paypal is very convenient but you need to have jumped through these hoops before you are able to use it, and then some (like having to open a new paypal account for each different jurisdiction, yet additional fees, etc.). And last, but not the least, transferring money in and out of the country is costly and is a major pain legally.

Not that Bitcoin has helped us do away with all this, but the mere fact that it has the potential to relieve some of this burden is enough.

Granted, I have a good setup where it's pretty convenient for my wife to send/receive money without having to worry about concerns like security. She would probably have done it using an online wallet if I wasn't here, which isn't that exhilarating. You don't really consciously get it but having to trust a third party causes mild amounts of anxiety. That's why I think we need a secondary lightweight network on top of Bitcoin to be used by mobile devices for small transactions, but I digress...

EDIT: Ah, and also, having been in discussions about block generation intervals lately, I told to her apologetically: "It takes a lot of time to confirm doesn't it?". She looked at my face as if I was an idiot.

Yes. What we need is an easy way for consumers to acquire bitcoins and for merchants an easy way to accept payment in bitcoins. For the latter I really like what Bit-Pay are doing, for the former I still think it's too complicated.

When it comes to actual clients I stay away from showing people the Satoshi client completely in favor of Andreas' Bitcoin Wallet for Android. A quick demonstration of how easy payment via the QR code system is and most merchants respond by wanting Bitcoin to replace their current credit card system immediately.


True. I've personally only traded once on MtGox, all my other BTC purchases have been P2P through Bitmarket.eu for that very reason.

Painpal and similar entities not so much "protect" against fraud as shift the damage to almost exclusively the established merchants (since scammers run for cash out pretty fast, they hardly care that much, it's basically them vs. time after you send them a Paypal transfer, and with proper skills and prep, they easily outrun an average person's ability to realize the fact of fraud and file complaints), which strikes me as somewhat perverse (though I could definitely see how some people might find that setup comforting)

As for due diligence, well, we have #bitcoin-police @ freenode. Do check those guys out ( Google  bitcoin police IRC if you don't know what the love Freenode is)


I suspect that deflation does not work like that.

Deflation and different economic schools links can be found here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=11627.0

you can use it to become a pioneering entrepreneur I guess

if you even have to ask that question youre probably just a consumer that will eventually be forced to use bitcoins by companies like the ones you mentioned.

I would say that's a bit of hyperbole, but I get your point. I think a better way to put it is:

Yes, Bitcoin at it's current level of adoption is more of a hassle than a benefit for the completely average person who doesn't do any sort of transaction other than paying bills, buying groceries and gas, buying some stuff off Amazon every once in a while, etc. However, these are also certainly not the "shot callers" of the world, and definitely have a miniscule influence in adoption of new currencies. They go wherever the market pushes them.

Chargebacks exist to protect the consumer. They are a good thing.

That concerns me. It again seems as though bitcoin is specifically prohibitive to casual investors and low-income people. Or, more to the point, it prioritizes the rich and those who were early adopters.

Right. And with Bitcoin if someone steals my wallet and spends all the coins in it I'm screwed. No recourse. All my money is gone. With Credit cards I'm not liable and all my money is still there.

See what I did there? Still have money in the bank.

Bitcoin shifts damage exclusively to the consumer. I have no economics background, but aren't there more consumers then merchants? Aren't merchants themselves consumers? PayPal is not a perfect system. Bitcoin does not offer improvements to the consumer- just to the seller.

I have a problem with this logic. Yes, large companies have influence over the market. However, most of these companies are successful because they understand their markets. Paypal is a big deal because paypal courts those looking for buyer-security. Why would a big company adopt Bitcoin? A company the size of amazon experiences minor fraud, but If they wanted to see the benefit of switching to Bitcoin, they would have to turn around and sell their customers on the idea of Bitcoin. They would have to push people to Bitcoin rather than paypal. And the concern I would see for them is the association. The first time a customer is scammed, their thought would be 'I never had this problem with paypal. Why did <company> tell me this is better?' And negative press spreads so much faster then positive.

From an outside perspective, I think it's a huge mistake for you to tell me that you don't want my business. I wouldn't bring a huge amount of money into the market, sure. but what about anyone else who is looking for the pros and cons of Bitcoins to the consumer and find this thread? I'm giving you a chance to make Bitcoin appealing to more people, and so far the most attractive thing I've heard is using it as a Western Union alternate.

Also, Googled and looked into bitcoin-police. It looks very new- two posts on a blog, wiki with a lot of info on the mybitcoin scandal. Have they successfully helped anyone recover funds? Or at least, brought any bitcoin scammers to some form of justice? 

This is true, but it's harder to be scammed by cash based merchants. It's possible, but generally if you walk into an office, store, or artist you can get a feel for the quality of work/product. There is also a lot more work involved on the scammers part, and the potential rewards are nominal for most products/services. Excluding unsolicited salesmen approaching me (the physical equivalent of wealthy Nigerian widows), I can shop with some faith that my cash isn't going to end up just vanishing.

And yes, bitcoin does have to be either/or to see the benefit. The main selling point of Bitcoin- what I've seen time and time again, is that If i am a merchant, I will never have to deal with chargeback fraud. But if i accept Bitcoin and PayPal, the people who are honest enough to use Bitcoin wouldn't scam me in the first place. As long as I accept Paypal, I have to worry that I will be given false chargebacks. I would want to encourage people to use BTC, if not outright exclude PayPal.

Bitcoin is tax-free  :)

Not if you convert it into to dollars for profit.

Really?

To my understanding of US tax laws- If you earn money, it needs to be reported. If you make a tidy amount selling widgets for BTC, you'd need to report that income- Just as if you would report money earned in a foreign currency. (Especially if you then exchange the BTC for USD to buy food/pay bills/buy jetskis).

Even if BTC is not considered an actual currency, it's still a possession of some value- and I know at some point they ask about that. I've seen someone claim that 'BTC only has the value that's assigned to it' but that's true of well, everything.

I'd talk to a tax accountant about, if you have a decent sized wallet. Better to consult on it once, then muck up and look at fees and penalties.  I'm not going to assume it falls through a loophole just because I really want it to.

So  you are   willing to shift the responsibility for your carelessness on other agents in the market who had nothing to do with your poor security decisions and terrible luck ?

:-P


Well, it seems to me that it's not a question of "who has more numbers" but a question of incentives such a set-up creates.

Shifting all the damages to merchants penalizes fair merchants and mildly annoys (at best) scammers

Shifting  all the damages to the consumer does penalize a careless / inexperienced consumer, but in the end a consumer has more ways to do due diligence on a merchant than a merchant on a consumer (online merchants are, by necessity, somewhat static, while online consumers typically are pretty ephemeral)

To me, chargebacks are obviously a corrupt system that creates perverse incentives

Also, nothing in principle prohibits various "fraud insurance" schemes (including ones I would consider "perverse" :) ) from arising, but, due to bitcoin's transparency (paradoxically, bitcoin is perhaps by far the most transparent online payment system, since everyone can view everyone's transaction log)

BTW, transparency is one more notable feature of bitcoin - you can go and take a look how your transaction is "moving around" in Block Explorer, which might have a lot of uses.


Everything about bitcoin is by necessity young.

Also, bear in ming that new functionality is being developed and tested (check out multicoin, it's amazing)

Well it needs to be said what income is. It is any excess over par value in an exchange

Because BTC can be used to buy goods or services that normally wouldn't be obtainable online through paypal, etc.
A.K.A , the reason why a lot of people get into BTC in the first place...

http://bitcoin-trader.blogspot.com/2011/09/14-things-you-can-do-with-bitcoin-that.html

credit cards arent actual money, theyre proxy money.
they assign a number to the actual money they hold in the vault. that money never actually moves.

you can use a service like that for bitcoins as well.

one that offers chargebacks, etc. and all of that.

Credit cards companies do not hold any money in a vault.

My carelessness? Again, I'm Joe Average, but I have some standards I try to follow. If i'm looking at an online store that I have never used before, I look for a contact us page first- But I've seen more then a fair share of sites that don't have anything other then an email address. Then I look around for reviews- but what if the site is only a year old? Or how do I judge reviews? Astroturfing is a fear with anything that has too many 5 star reviews. I've seen more then one site that I waffled forever on if it looked or felt legitimate.
Now put this in terms of bitcoin where a lot of these merchants are six months to a year old. Oh, it's easy enough to identify a scammer once they've taken someones money and run, but until then... I don't know what you consider DD with just opened Bitcoin merchants.

And Bitcoin- if it is as anonymous as people say, has the incentive for long haul scams. I'm really not going to discuss the mybitcoin accusations- but the fact that people think it's possible someone started an exchange, waited a long while, before making off with a large sum of coins. Even if that's not what happened here, what's to stop it from happening in the near future?

This doesn't really appeal to me. I am understanding this as products/services that are illegal. While I have my own opinions about the laws involved, I don't think going to Bitcoin to use the net to circumvent them is a good idea. Bitcoin is anonymous, but still has transparent transactions. Also, if this is really the driving force of Bitcoin, it tarnishes the image of any legitimate merchants considering using it.

I can't believe no one mentioned the most objective advantage of bitcoin: I can send money around the world without paying anything.

It may not be that useful to the average consumer, but it is the first currency that allows this. For example, I am an european and I really like dealextreme.com because they offer free shipping and they sell cheap stuff. I would really like to pay them with bitcoins because I lose a lot of money with the EUR/USD conversion.

Also, bitcoin is not anonymous by design. It allows for a certain degree of privacy and it can be sort of anonymous, but you must use other tools for that. I agree with most of what faustianover said. Bitcoin does not have one simple great advantage for consumers. It is technologically rather interesting and it offers some interesting features that some people want. However most consumers simply don't find these attractive enough to justify the change. At least right now.

Addressing my thoughts on this.

1) Tip your favourite blogger ten cents with a near-zero transaction fee (less than a penny).

Understood, though 10 cents seems a bit more of an insult then a tip. A dollar or two for no transaction fees is fine.

2) Write a book, create artwork, play a song, upload it, and sell it, now. No shopping carts, no publishers, no distributers, no PayPal, no credit cards, no addresses

I've actually looked into this, before I heard about Bitcoin. In this day and age it's actually pretty easy to setup a merchant site, or work with something like amazon's publishing service.Joe average can do it, if not as well as an expert. Bitcoin may make it a little easier. Oh the other hand, this is what also makes Bitcoin attractive to scammers.

3) Send a dollar to someone half a world away for less than a penny.

4) Send ten thousand dollars to someone half a world away for less than a penny.

These points could just be one point- which also is the same as the first point. Bitcoin offers cheap money transactions.  If i had contacts, I could almost see starting a Western Union style service. On the other hand, i'm hearing mixed things about the speed of Bitcoin transfers, and at this moment in time I'd have to turn around and exchange that money for local currency which in some places could be a three step process with more associated fees. (also, Id have to trust every single node involved to not take the money and run, or give false information as I took in applications to open branches)
It's one of Bitcoins better selling points, but it still need maturing for the public at large.


5) Maintain a savings account without paying someone else to hold your money or give it back to you.
 

My first thought at this question was "well, I could just stuff all my cash in a safe for the same benefit." Then I reread.
I have three bank accounts. None of them cost me money. My savings account earns money- not much, but it's still money they give me for keeping my money there. My checking accounts are free. For one checking account, I did have to pay a small onetime fee for a debt card, but that is the only fee involved. I've never had to pay ATM fees either- There's a slight, ever so slight inconvenience in that I have to keep track of where a branch ATM is if I need money, but I pass two of them on the way two and from work every day. I realize this may be a case where I'm not as much Joe Average- but There are decent banks out there.

6) Withdraw your winnings from an online casino - all of it - and get it instantly. Do it without anyone knowing your name or where you live.

7) Playing poker at your buddy's place? Don't worry about stopping at an ATM to get cash. Settle your winnings at the end of the night without trying to figure out how to make change.

Online poker I can see. But playing poker with your buddies- This isn't something I personally do, but if I did, I'd bring the cash I was planning on spending with me. Maybe I just don't get it.

8) Eating out at a restaurant and the waitress won't split the bill? Let someone else pay and give them the exact amount you owe, to the penny. No need to carry cash.

9) Running out from the office to buy lunch for your co-workers? No need to collect the money in advance. Send them the payment address and they can pay their share without leaving their desks.

These hinge on the same thing that 7) does. I would need my buddies/coworkers to use Bitcoins. And if I wanted to get them to use Bitcoins, Their first question would be "Why".. which is what I'm asking right in this thread. Sure, paying debts back and forth via BTC might be simpler, but it's going to take a lot more then that to convince the people I associate with- especially when most of them have a low level of technical knowledge- to put a significant amount of money into BTC.

10) Set up an online store in minutes. No shopping carts, no payment processors, no fees.

11) Receive a payment and not worry about a chargeback from the credit card company or from PayPal. All payments are final.

10) is pretty much Identical to 2). It's incredibly easy to setup a Bitcoin business. From what I've seen, there isn't much hassle involved in becoming a Paypal business. I'm actually kinda uneasy about being so easy to setup a business- In the course of writing this, I realized not only does it invite scams, but it also requires less dedication on the part of the merchant. If I am serious about selling widgets online, I can spend time setting up a website and dealing with paypal. If that much is too hard, How do I expect to keep up if my shop becomes popular?

For that matter, I could sell things on ebay, or even just go to the communities I frequent and trade paypal information.

12) Send money to any organization. No middle-man can stop you from supporting a cause.

This contains a link to news about wikileaks. I applaud the ideal. I also am not comfortable bringing my politics into this- I want a reasoned debate, not a flaming. The thing is, Wikileak's politics aside - The reason a middleman would stop you, in every scenario I can think of, is illegality. As I responded to thefighter - This is not a reason for me to get into BTC. This is not the main reason to advertise BTC. This is a reason that any established business looking at accepting BTC would hesitate to associate with. Ideals are fine, I support you there. But if the primary drive of Bitcoin is to get money to business that paypal, mastercard, or banks won't touch because of legal concerns, the future of Bitcoin is not so bright.

13) Protect your wealth from your country's unsustainable financial policies without destroying the environment or native land.

Link to a discussion about the environmental damage of gold-mining. Without an economy background, I can't comment on 'unsustainable financial policies' (although also a bit confused. I thought a lot of nations were no longer on the gold standard?). I can ask about the impact of Bitcoin mining though. It probably is not be as bad, but I'd like to see the numbers.

14) Travel to another country. Cover your expenses without exchanging currencies (coming soon).


Well, let me know more about that when it's happened.

So how do you change this? The sending money worldwide without worrying about conversion (Well, assuming bitcoin prices stabilize) is a good thing. It's also the only one I'm hearing.

A lot of talk about the upsides to Bitcoin requires Bitcoin be in common use. Sending money just to friends, not paying credit card fees, or having to worry about PayPal. To see these as superior to the alternatives, the community needs to sell the concept of Bitcoin. It's an uphill struggle.


It feels like one of the main reasons people get involved with BTC is as an investment vehicle- Either to start mining, or to play the 'buy low sell high' game (I guess scammers could fall under this too, get money quick schemes). This doesn't support BTC in the long run- A major drop in the exchange rate and people in this category would leave. Already I get the feel that most of the forks are in the same vein- Longing for the days when BTC was much easier to mine, before the peak in prices over the summer.

From a layperson view, I'd think getting more Average Joe's into BTC would help support the stability of the currency. It would certainly help get more established merchants to accept it, and help ensure its longevity. I just don't see an effort made to legitimately make Bitcoin attractive.

I can't speak for the entire Bitcoin community, but for me it's a tool of freedom and that makes it priceless.
I beleive and strongly desire a goverment based on the original principals of some of the great U.S founders (i.e. Jefferson).
It was called a Republic and the people were at the top of the food chain; however, with the creation of central banks,
and especially the Federal Reserve, it has taken that power from the people. Now power follows the flow of money.
Basically, we went from a republic and turned it into an empire. Bitcoin, a little more inconvient, is
a great tool to carry on commerce and return some of that power back to the people.

Since I'm curious, are you by any chance american?

Wikileaks have done nothing illegal and are not convicted of any crime, yet VISA, Mastercard and Paypal refuse me if I want to support them. (They have no issues aiding me if I would ever want to support the Ku Klux Klan though). Not only refuse, they froze existing assets as well, seriously disrupting WL business.

It's actually a really good argument for why we need something like Bitcoin.

I am an american.

This is the one and only comment I will make on Wikileaks. I like the idea. I believe that governments should be transparent.

This does not change the fact that Wikileaks is legally questionable at best. To my understanding, if you provide a document that is labeled 'classified' by the department of defense to the public, it is a crime. You could argue the criminal was the person who orginally uploaded the document, but I believe the wording of the law is vague enough to cause doubt as to how Wikileaks is.

I see it the way I would see prohibition- I do not support the law. I think the law could/should change. But that does not change the fact that it's currently Illegal, or helping others commit crimes.

The Klu Klux Klan is despicable, but they are not to my knowledge you could not accuse them of a crimes as an organization.

I support Wikileaks.

I also wholeheartedly understand why Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal won't do business with them. If my business/job was on the line as theirs is, I would not risk it either.

Call me a coward if you want, but I call it pragmatism. Ideals are great things, but I've never bought food with them.

I will not continue this discussion on this thread, which is for asking why the average consumer would benefit from Bitcoins.

Honestly, I don't know. Maybe the problem is that the Bitcoin client is not user friendly, or that there isn't an easy fast way to buy bitcoins, or that a lot of websites have been hacked lately, or maybe the problem lies in Bitcoin itself because it isn't appealing to most consumers. I'm still trying to figure it out...

You are correct. A lot of people are only in it for the profits. And most of the alternative chains were created because people wanted to "get in" early and mine with low difficulty. A few of those alternatives are already succumbing due to poor design decisions and critical bugs in the code.

Your understanding has no basis in existing case law. VISA, Mastercard and Paypal do not need to make legal judgements themselves. Either there's a successful criminal case towards Wikileaks, after which they can act, or there is not. What happened is that behind-the-doors political pressure on American companies caused non-Americans significant harm, and it's not an isolated incident.


Luckily for the world, throughout history, some people live by them as well. Your "Founding Fathers" would be one example.