Bitcoin Forum

I consider bitcoin to be mostly a monetary superset of gold. I use the word "mostly" because bitcoin is not physical, is (currently) not recognizable by the general population, and cannot serve a purpose in a non-electronic society scenario.

But obviously it has all of gold's other qualities (the ones that provide most of gold's inherent utility/value), and usually does them better (eg, divisibility, known/limited supply, durability, etc). Plus totally new, and desirable, qualities (transactability, etc).

So....in the rosiest of scenarios for bitcoin and humanity (ie, still a coherent civilization that involves electronic technology, no big flaws found in bitcoin, etc), does bitcoin simply replace gold since it's inherently more desirable in such a world....ie, some corollary of Gresham's law in play...?


(please note that for the purposes of this question, I'm pre-supposing that there's been no 51% attack, gov hasn't killed bitcoin, protocol is still solid and scales ok, etc, etc...)

Not in the very near future. It is very hard for an average Joe to start believing in bitcoin, while gold is physical and something that is easy to understand. Bitcoin is too difficult concept.

And even then, there will probably be many competing cryptocurrencies/virtual currencies in the future.

There are many competing cryptocurrencies now, but none of them offer anything more than what bitcoin offers, and arguably bitcoin has more support and developers.

Bitcoin will have real competition once a cryptocurrency emerges which offers a service bitcoin could not fulfill. Honestly I don't see that happening as bitcoin is able to evolve and improve.

There are basically two kinds of "large holders"of gold.  Government entities (central banks) and rich private parties (e.g. Kyle Bass).

Would love to be proved wrong, but I don't think central banks will be selling gold to add Bitcoin reserves anytime soon, I don't think they would want to willingly give it any legitimacy.

Private large gold holders, however, are another matter.  If their reasons to hold gold are to protect against oppressive government actions and  scenarios like a collapse in the financial system, then I predict they will eventually exchange some percentage of their gold hedge for Bitcoins.  Why?

Because if you assume an oppressive surveillance state, the gold hedge potentially fails under several plausible scenarios: confiscation orders, windfall taxes, x-ray border controls, and so on.

If the stormtroopers break down your door with metal detectors in hand, only Bitcoin is both pseudonymous and intangible enough to give you a chance of hiding your wealth or escaping with it across borders.  Big money will figure this out (if it hasn't already) and act accordingly.  Offshore accounts used to be a solution for this scenario, but recent events have proven that banks will give up their clients if pressured hard enough.

Think big.  Bitcoin is a fantastically good diversifier/insurance for multimillionaires and billionaires.  Once Bitcoin starts being marketed properly as "ultimate disaster insurance" to private wealth portfolios, its price will go to unimaginable heights.

Some interesting points. Next question then is: How much privately held gold is there? Well, I believe it's estimated that about 150,000 tons have been mined to date, and it looks like governments directly control about 30,000 tons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve). So, 120,000 tons in private hands. Interestingly, according to that wikipedia page, about 50% of the world's gold exists as jewelry. This is a need bitcoin cannot fill that I hadn't considered.

Oh yeah? I'm gunna sign something with a key holding 1000 coins and wear the message on my shirt. BLING

Someone needs to make an iphone app "BLING verifier"

Please note that I'm considering "eventually" here to mean decades; ie, several generations. It's a theoretical discussion.

I must concede that for ornamentation purposes and female appeal, physical metals are likely to always have an edge over Bitcoin.  At least until Casascius strings together a bunch of coins and starts producing necklaces :)

Either way I think the thread title's assumption is wrong, demand for Bitcoin won't necessarily imply migration from gold, I think demand will be additive and both will continue to go up because they address different scenarios and have different risk profiles.  They complement each other beautifully.  And that hybrid 1oz gold/1000 BTC coin Casascius produced embodies the synthesis very elegantly, the premium over spot is more than I feel comfortable paying but I think I will eventually regret never having bought one:

Now Here: Casascius 1000 BTC Fine Gold Coin
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54845.0

I think they're minor compliments, but mostly substitutes (again, under the pre-conditions outlined in my initial post). To re-state: the primary value/utility of gold comes from core monetary properties, which bitcoin also possesses...but better. You raise some interesting points about super-oppressive state scenarios ("confiscation orders, windfall taxes, x-ray border controls, and so on"), but I think that's 2nd order to why people primarily own gold (inflation hedge). Thus, in my opinion, they're mostly substitutes.

Long-term, that is. Short term (the next couple decades), you're probably right in that they'll be used as compliments. But in the long-run, the better money should win out unless humanity goes down some road where the currently 2nd order properties take on primary importance.

That would be about as appealing as idk, wearing bank account number around your neck. But if you really think you gonna set a trend with that - go ahead and do it. You could be the biggest supplier for bitcoin bling.... And I even think if there is another, much larger bitcoin bubble some people ought to do it...  ;D

Of course the irony would be if the thing then contains any gold in the physical form in the first place, like at least the gold contacts if not the casing  :o

I used to think that the concept would be too difficult for an average Joe.

But if you consider the complexity of the current monetary system, almost nobody I know cares about that when they use it.

So I am starting to believe that can happen with Bitcoin too. Once Bitcoin becomes more easy to use and mainstream will see that it works and that they can actually buy things they need with it, they won't be thinking about the concept. That will only be of interest to a relatively small number of geeks.

Remember, some portion of that has been consumed.

To answer the question, though, I think 10% of private gold is a reasonable maximum.

I would say so far bitcoin has had about 0% effect on gold capitalization.

Really, we have been using gold for 6000 years, bitcoin for 3. While bitcoin has done a wonderful job in decentralizing its counterparty risk, it still has counterparty risk in that it relies on multiple existing infrastructures like the bitcoin network, the internet, and the power grid.

With gold you can trade where there is no internet connection and no computers. It can be instantly identified by its very high density without the need for mind boggling math, and it can be explained to a 3 year old.

Gold is not just for governments and rich people. Common folk like me can buy it up a little bit at a time. I have a couple dozen oz and as such I get to hold my wealth just like the big boys do.

I am pretty sure gold will be the go to commodity for the very wealthy until such a time as transmutation of atoms because cost effective.

I'm reposting Gengix's insightful reworking of Exter's pyramid from another thread.  Gold and Bitcoin are two banks of the same river, one is in the tangible realm, the other in the intangible, but ultimately their methods and purpose are very similar.  

Smart people will hold both, because as people have pointed out in this thread, each has advantages under different scenarios.  

As such, it could be argued that in the very long term (100s of years), prudent savings might be typically allocated along a 50/50 split of gold and BTC.  But that doesn't necessarily mean gold is going to drop in price; if you believe that the current financial system is largely a ponzi scheme destined to evaporate, then the amount of money that will flow from overvalued paper instruments into gold over the coming decades will likely far exceed any money moving from gold to Bitcoin.  I base this statement on my own experience: my Bitcoin holdings have been obtained not by selling any gold I owned, but by converting some of my paper holdings.  It's a type of Gresham's Law at the individual level.

http://bitcoinmedia.com/uploads/2012/04/Exter_Bitcoin1.png

Nice diagram  8)

As a savage, I find any talk of civilization very offensive


Not much durability compared to gold: any SHTF event (from an EMP to coffee spilled on a notebook could mean disaster for noobs), not to speak of the next trendy p2p money which may take off any time.


I will believe that when Indian, Chinese and Arabs forget about gold to buy just Bitcons

Never underestimate primal urges: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

If Bitcoin ever gains traction, there will be idiots displaying their public address barcodes to show how loaded they are.

like me!  ;D --> http://blockchain.info/address/1Gyrsur3XcEoGjCarnXvGTVAS3rvjsdVm3 (http://blockchain.info/address/1Gyrsur3XcEoGjCarnXvGTVAS3rvjsdVm3)

EDIT: also mentionable, gold is not so save as you suppose --> http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-gold-standard-easier-said-done (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-gold-standard-easier-said-done)
"Clearly one of the key risks in this scenario is that the US government would need to acquire as much gold as they can get their hands on, likely through Roosewellian-style gold confiscation."

Yes it is!  Picture = 1000 words.

I'm going to get it tattooed on my back, to save time when giving introductory explanations of bitcoin.

Edit: Who made it?  Is it from an article?

Here is the context for that picture:

http://bitcoinmedia.com/gold-is-a-physical-element-bitcoin-is-an-abstract-protocol/ (http://bitcoinmedia.com/gold-is-a-physical-element-bitcoin-is-an-abstract-protocol/)

Thanks n8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU.

Thn8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU.

...and there will always be idiots like me who actually spend time checking  :D

That's not what counterparty risk is.  Counterparty risk is when someone owes you.  What you are saying is merely being part of a modern society.

You have a car.  About 98% of the usefulness of a car actually comes from things other than the car:  roads, gas, mechanics.  They aren't counterparties, and that isn't counterparty risk.  That is, er, societal risk or something, because your society could decide (somehow) to stop having those other things.  The good news is that for most of us, if those infrastructures go away, we'll be dead long before we have to worry about money.


Gold trades easily where the gold physically is.  Bitcoin trades easily where the bitcoin network is, which at this point is pretty much everywhere all the time.  I'm going to have to give the advantage to bitcoin on this one.  There is no reason why you couldn't trade gold electronically too, which would even that field, but the only way to do that is to trust a counterparty to owe you gold and reassign their debt to the new owner.  (There are services that do exactly this, of course)

By the way, congratulations on your stack.  I'm more of a silver guy myself because I can afford bigger stacks of it, which are more fun to play with, but I have a couple of tiny gold coins and they sure are pretty.

I think there is a conflation of four different types of risk.

With gold or bitcoins you can hold it yourself or have a third party hold it. With FRN$ you can hold it yourself or lend it to a financial institution. Usually a financial institution needs to be involved to transfer value over distance. Thus, FRN$ are the blood while banks, Paypal, credit cards, etc. are the veins.

Gold or bitcoins you hold yourself are subject only to exchange rate risk.

Gold or bitcoins you have a third party hold are subject to exchange rate risk and performance risk. Performance risk is the risk that a party will perform their contract.

FRN$ you hold yourself are subject to exchange rate risk and currency risk; they can become absolutely worthless.

FRN$ you lend to a financial institution, like with fractional reserve banking, money markets, etc. are subject to these four types of risk: exchange rate risk, currency risk, performance risk and counter-party risk which is the financial ability of the counter-party to perform the contract.

This is where Bitcoin becomes extremely powerful because it is both the blood and the veins. In performing that service when you use it yourself it eliminates performance risk and counter-party risk.

Well, I, for one, have bought some bitcoins with money I would've otherwise used for gold, but yeah, obviously the impact is essentially nothing right now. When I use the word "eventually" in this thread's title, I mean, decades/generations.



Agree with kjj above about definition of counterparty risk. But your underlying point, that bitcoin relies on more infrastructure than gold, is of course valid. However, your implication that one must fully understand the cryptography on which bitcoin is based in order to understand that bitcoin has value is just silly. Humans very willingly assign value to all kinds of things they don't fully understand (like federal-reserve-notes, for example).



How does this not hold true even more so with bitcoin?



For now, yes. In say, 10yrs, if bitcoin is accepted by a decent number of merchants and the general public has heard of it, I think it won't be too strange for people to hold X% of their "hard money" portfolios in bitcoin. Maybe not in place of gold at that point, but in addition to (eg, maybe the X% of total portfolio is a point or two bigger allowing for the btc holdings). Eventually, I'm positing that people may decide that they're holding bitcoin and gold for the same reasons (except the end-of-the-world folks who will hold mostly guns and seeds anyways), and that bitcoin has the same properties as gold plus a whole lot more. Thus, a tendency to hold more btc instead of gold long-term. But who knows....that's why I'm asking the question. Curious to see if there seems to exist a good theoretical reason why that would never happen.

as the only one around here who seems to have traded the majority of his gold/silver in exchange for Bitcoin, I will add one more form of risk; that of security.

i used to have 2 safes full of pm's.  when i was not home or travelling, i used to worry about someone breaking into the safes as my one and only level of security.

now, with Bitcoin and w/o getting too specific, i think in terms of having five levels of security built in revolving around the safe door, multiple distributed copies, passworded usb keys, self destruct capabilities, encrypted wallets.

not only does Bitcoin accomplish the store of wealth function, it is also currently serving as an efficient medium of exchange.

gold isn't doing anywhere near as well at the latter. 

the key thing is that we have to estimate how much gold there is b/c it keeps changing.  miners continue to dig it up, much is hoarded away uncounted, and its possible that we'll be able to manufacture it in the near future.  and then there's the whole deep sea and asteroid argument which i don't put much stock in. 

i'd much rather deal with the certainty of a mathematical algorithm.  the fixed supply is not going to change as Bitcoin has already successfully dealt with inflatable alt chains.

most fiat currency today is digital.  i think that's really what Bitcoin is competing with.

I agree with this. I started this thread to see if someone could point out a good theoretical reason why bitcoin will never replace gold, and I don't think anything solid has been stated yet. Again, my assertion that bitcoin is a monetary superset of gold (eg, does what gold does, but better...plus awesome medium of exchange for the modern world). Bitcoin only fails vs. gold if there's no internet, which I think is valid to fold into the analysis, but is ultimately a long-tail (eg, 2nd order) consideration.

To be clear, though, I do agree with some of the other folks in this thread that bitcoin and gold will effectively be used as compliments for a while (many years), though ultimately (decades) they seem like supplements with bitcoin being the "better money".

a couple of personal experiences.

i just found out Friday that not only am i being charged 2-3% of gross revenues on average by my processor for CC tx's but also that they have been charging me $30/mo for not having answered a PCI Compliance Questionnaire each year.  this has been going on for years w/o my knowledge.  they claim they notified me about this requirement in the fine print of my monthly statement once a year.  i've also caught them gradually increasing the % fees from time to time and slipping in all sorts of other fees.  it's an ongoing battle.  the costs of actually implementing the PCI Compliance is expensive and burdensome as well.

i have found that in the 4 short months since i've started my subscription service that dealing with Bitcoin has been a much more efficient and cost effective method of payment for services.  granted, i'm exchanging an information based service for Bitcoin as opposed to durable goods but still the point holds.  i can easily see how a wallet like Armory could be adapted to a Walmart or Costco model.

Gold is industrial metal and jewelry. Bitcoin is nothing but currency.

Industrial and jewelry demand make up a tiny fraction of gold's current price. Gold was $300/oz not long ago, with roughly the same industrial/jewelry demand as now. Gold's price is driven predominantly by its perceived monetary value. I feel like you didn't read the thread (or even bother to think *a little* about the points made in my first post) before posting your above irrelevancy.

Or rather until asteroid mining becomes cost effective. Which could actually be pretty soon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Resources).

let me add that to really appreciate how easy it is to use Bitcoin in commerce one should try Armory.

it allows me to control multiple wallets, use watching only wallets to monitor offline balances, import keys, and most importantly generate addresses for new subscribers on an ongoing basis w/o exposing private keys.  this is made possible by the deterministic wallet.  its really a nifty tool that provides the ultimate in security.

edit:  sorry if i'm straying from the topic at hand but these little things i'm talking about have only reinforced my outlook on the transition from gold to Bitcoin.

Not off topic... Supports my position that bitcoin is a monetary SUPERset of gold.

I feel what you're saying too - every time I fire off some coins from my wallet to some service (or vice-versa) without exposing any sensitive information or having to type in a bunch of irrelevant data (or wait 3 days (eg: EFT)), I always think "Ahhh, this is indeed how money should *actually* work in the 21st century.".

Would you please clarify the "w/o exposing private keys" part? Just like your private keys are subject to theft on a compromised machine, so is the seed for deterministic wallet. Besides, a key pair is a key pair - deterministic or not.

Private key -> public key is a trapdoor.  Knowing the public key had better not tell you anything about the private key, or we've got HUGE problems, far beyond the mere $100,000,000 market cap of bitcoin.

With that in mind, Armory lets you add addresses (or public keys) for monitoring, while the mainline client only accepts private key imports.  But don't get mad, the reference client has a lot of stuff that it must handle, even though Armory can skip it.  They do different jobs, in different ways.

Still don't get it - cypherdoc mentioned generating new addresses without exposing private keys. How would that work?
 

the wallet that is generated within Armory is deterministic based on a seed and a chain code.  this is distinctly different from the Satoshi client.  this is kept as an offline wallet on a computer only accessible by the owner of a large store in the back room.  "watching wallets"  of this same offline wallet are  placed on computers at the cashier checkout stands.  these watching wallets have the capability of generating a brand new address for each customer that comes thru the store when paying for an item.  these watching wallets do not have private keys associated with them so the cashiers can't steal the btc.  the cool thing about the owner's offline wallet and the cashiers watching wallet is that they generate the same addresses ad nauseum sequentially from the seed and chain code.  the only difference again is that the cashiers watching wallets don't have the private keys.

edit:  i didn't say this quite correctly.  each cashier would have a watching wallet connected to its paired distinct offline deterministic wallet.

Hmm.  I'm going to have to read his source.  That doesn't seem possible to me, unless it is really generating the list of private keys and deleting them.

Cypherdoc, many thanks. I sent you a PM to bug you with more questions (that's what you get for being helpful), so we can stay on topic here.

from etotheipi:

To create a full wallet, you create a Private Key (Priv[0]) and a chaincode (C).
Priv[0] and C  is your full wallet (two 32-byte integers)
Pub[0] and C  is your watching-only wallet (a 32-byte integer, and a point on the ECDSA curve, which is 2 32-byte integers)

All subsequent keys are produce (roughly) by Priv[i+1] = C*Priv,  or Pub[i+1]=C*Pub

Let's assume half of the gold market cap would go into Bitcoin...

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold I extrapolate the amount of gold ever extracted to be at least 172,000 tonnes. After a little calculation the market cap of this at current gold price is: $9,724,379,108,640

/21,000,000

/2

$231,533 per BTC

 ;D

Well... These calcs are always wildly speculative, but what the hell:

First, you need to try and isolate the "investment" value of gold versus its industrial, and arguably, jewelry usage, if you want to be *a little* conservative about it... According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve), 16% of total mined gold is used for private (ie, non-central-bank) investment. Using your 172,000 total mined tonnage figure, that's 27,520 tons as private investment.

Let's also say that bitcoin only snags 2% of gold's private investment demand:

2% of 27,520 tons = 550.4 tons = 17,612,800 ounces = $31,253,913,600.

Divided by 21,000,000 BTC = $1488 / BTC

This is reasonable, just keep in mind that 2% is an arbitrary number, not an estimate of anything.

I can give you a slightly less arbitrary number, which is the percentage of my own gold holdings versus bitcoin holdings.  I'm fully allocated in both for the long term, and don't intend to buy (or sell) any more gold or bitcoins unless their fundamentals change.  So you've got (assuming I'm typical in terms of risk profile, a big assumption) at least one data point in terms of how much bitcon a goldbug might target in order to diversify their portfolio.

My ratio is approx 10:1 in favor of gold.  So:

9% of 27,520 tons = 2476 tons = 79232000oz = $140399104000

Divided by 21,000,000 BTC = $6685/ BTC

It would be interesting if other gold holders posted they target Gold:BTC ratios on this thread. A ratio is a relatively safe, obscure, and private number to post because it doesn't disclose your position size.  If enough people are willing to respond, I could also create another thread with a poll.

here's another former gold bugs perspective:  my ratio is approx 20:1.  in favor of Bitcoin.  how's that for ya? ;D

@cypherdoc: why am I not surprised?  ;D

Anyway, these estimates perhaps provide a theoretical, long-term equilibrium if all the people turned into btc enthusiasts like us: the btc share would then be 10%-95%. I'd argue that this equilibrium will never be reached, and realistic estimate would be few percent at best.
 This amounts to several thousands of today's usd per coin. This is assuming coins are not used for trading goods and services, which they are.

Somewhere between the two of us, probably lies a representative average :)

Well, my own ratio of PMs to Bitcoin is roughly 1:1. But obviously we're going to skew heavily in this community...

Regardless, I used Gold:BTC of 49:1 (ie, 2% gold) in my example above in order to hopefully be a little conservative about these calcs... Even so - I've often stated that bitcoin's exchange rate is unstable between $1 and $100. However, running these calcs, and some other estimates involving transactional utility, I'm thinking more and more that it's valid to say bitcoin's exchange rate is unstable between $1 and $1000.

The success cases increasingly look like $1000+. Fail case is obviously pennies. Intermediate scenarios don't look all that likely. Anyone care to refute that; eg, can you make a reasonable case for some adoption model that yields $/BTC stable at something like $50/BTC long-term (assume 2012 dollars to get the fiat-inflation variable out for the moment)?

Agree with your assessment.  Binary outcome.  Either this rocket goes all the way to the moon, or it explodes before exiting the atmosphere (and all the pieces burn up on re-entry).  No middle ground.  Zero value if fatal algorithmic flaw is found, or some new cryptocurrency outcompetes it on features or mindshare.  But otherwise, even the crappiest adoption scenario (declared illegal worldwide, full-on government repression, usage in black markets and criminal contexts only) still yields potential demand in the billions and a price $1000+.  

Interesting discussion pertaining to "all or nothing" - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99689.0

Yeah, some folks perceive the government crackdown case as "nothing", but clearly that could still be a $1000+ valuation scenario simply through underground usage, a massively profitable "all" for anyone holding coins today.  At least in my mind, "nothing" excusively means that technical or feature problems drive Bitcoin to zero marketshare among cryptocurrencies, since clearly at least one cryptocurrency will forever be necessary.  The cryptocurrency concept is just too useful and is here to stay, whether it's Bitcoins or some 2nd generation coin.

To that point, someone in the thread you referenced, mentioned something tremendously insightful that might be easily overlooked, and which is yet another fantastic selling point for Bitcoin: in countries with highly regulated medical environments (e.g. UK NHS, USA Obamacare/FDA), Bitcoins are a kind of medical insurance.  Silk Road gets lots of negative press, but not all illegal drugs and treatments are recreational; it's completely conceivable that someday you or I might have a disease or condition whose treatment is not available through legal channels, either due to an experimental nature, price controls, or ideological issues.  

Regular insurance won't cover you if you desperately need to buy "illegal" medical goods and services.  What can you buy today, that will give you access to black market medications and treatments tomorrow?  Answer: Bitcoin.  The following bullet points sound like humorous hyperbole, but can be made with a straight face:

• Do you live in the USA or European nanny state? Bitcoins are an essential part of a medical insurance portfolio.
  
• Having Bitcoins might save your life.
  
• Not having Bitcoins might be hazardous to your health.

Just came across yet another interesting newsitem that can be used to persuade goldbugs that they should love Bitcoins and that intangibility can be an asset, and not a libability, versus gold.

Historically gold has been the prreferred method used by refugees to transport savings when fleeing dictatorships.  We've all heard the stories of Jews in the 30s or Vietnamese in the 70s escaping oppression and starting new lives thanks to carefully hiddden gold.

But try crossing borders with your Krugerrands once this technology gets deployed worldwide:

PTI Introduces New Metal Detector to Detect Precious Metals Inside the Human Body
http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/pti-introduces-new-metal-detector-to-detect-precious-metals-inside-the-human-body-176363.htm

The security risk is another extremely important issue and you have highlighted how Bitcoin is far superior to gold in that regard if handled with technical competence.

Another part of this thread that I think has been overlooked is the amount of market cap in 'censorship resistant' assets.

For example, how much of Scream's $120m sale (http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/02/us/new-york-the-scream/) is from its artistic value and how much from its 'censorship resistant' nature? After all, fine art can be rolled up and moved around the world pretty easily and that property is likely the greatest factor for the high bids. Same thing with diamonds, gems, trophy real estate properties, collectibles like first edition books, coins, etc.

When HNWI can store capital in bitcoins (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93839.0) instead of having to resort to these less efficient manners then I think the sale prices for them will also come down significantly.

Popular financial blogger Robert Wenzel (http://youtu.be/euKpYiKs6B8?t=23m15s) actually brought this issue up when discussing Bitcoins.

Yep it is a credit to his insight, coming from a skeptical viewpoint, to understand intuitively that Bitcoin's value rises proportionally to government issuance of regulations and restrictions.  Each time a new law gets passed deeming something illegal anywhere on the planet, Bitcoin expands its potential market.

All the Austrians and Miseans will come around to our viewpoint within the next few years.  It's impossible to be so smart about so many things, yet remain stupid about Bitcoin.  This I know, from my own experience ;D

The obvious skepticism of some of them influenced me and kept me away from Bitcoin for some time. But not anymore. :)

Same here, I first heared about bitcoin around januari 2011, but most people I listened to were pretty dismissive of it, so I didn't really put much effort into figuring it out in depth [I think there was an initial emotional reaction too ("this could be a better monetary alternative than gold, this could threaten my gold investment, so I don't want it to be true...")], and forgot about it afterwards.  
Would have been nice to buy in at 0.3 $ instead of 13$ though  ::) .

Sure, but when one BTC was worth pennies there was precious little to indicate that it would be worth dollars, other than pure speculation. The scenario isn't that different today: there is currently no reason right now to think that one BTC will be worth thousands of today's (not tomorrow's possibly hyperinflated-by-the-Bernank') dollars, other than guesswork...

Actually, if you make a few assumptions, there is (see my post here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113606.msg1365598#msg1365598 ).
I just wish I had done the calculation back then, because even though I knew it could be explosive if it was adopted, I never knew just how explosive it could get.  Knowing this, I probably would have spend more time figuring out the pro's and con's.