To any country, bitcoin is like a foreign currency, and on foreign currency exchange FOREX, 70-90% of volume is speculation, so its price is mainly decided by speculation, it will not cause recession since there are other currencies can be used to do the trade if bitcoin becomes more and more valuable

Since money can request others' product/services, it is a power. Who get the right to create this power will rule others. Without this power, those who lying on the beach can not request the product of those who working hard, and those who working hard could gain more wealth than former, that is a natural result of energy input

Indeed, today's monetary system greatly benefit money creator and those who are close to money creator. Money creation has become a stronger power than presidents, but this power is purely built on people's imaginary concept of money, if they don't have this concept, then the power will disappear (An example is that you take some Chinese Yuan to England and try to spend it, it will not be accepted except for Chinese people, since in English people's mind this is not money)

However, it is almost impossible for people to get rid of the concept of money, I think it is a very old, government dependent concept

Also, it is very difficult to imagine what is an ideal form of money: You can even use some scientifically accurate unit to measure value, like 1kwh electricity. However since the supply and demand will change based on market condition, 1kwh electricity would worth more during winter and less during summer, thus make it not suitable to work as unit of value

Ideally, an unit of value should keep its value constant regardless of supply and demand change, so it is best it is just an imaginary concept, does not have any demand. But as soon as it has value, it will have demand, and demand can not be a constant, so it is just impossible. That's the reason central banks trying to manipulate the supply to keep up with the demand change, but that is a best effort thing, since the demand usually changed long ago before they react. The reason fiat money have stable value is just because people's consensus that it SHOULD have a stable value, and banks keep majority of people from getting more fiat money, to make sure the demand is close to infinite

Value is all subjective, 1 million dollar worth a lot for average household but almost nothing for bankers. You don't care about spending 1 dollar more on your dinner tips, but for some other people that might be one day's pay. And the funny thing is: Those who get lowest salary work the hardest, while those earning millions of dollar per year lying on the beach, just because today's monetary system

Most of the doubt from newbies come from 3 categories:

1. They are not sure if it is a scam

2. They are not sure if they can handle the required IT skills

3. They don't understand why bitcoin is superior than fiat money

No need to educate them, they just need a proper channel to find out the answer by themselves

Time is also important, I have several friends constantly express their doubt for bitcoin during last several years but now they start to accept it as a normal existance

Much faster than you can imagine

I have a feeling that when everyone is ready, the next wave will be much larger than the previous two wave.  When daily coin supply becomes less and less, and the capital in the play is getting larger and larger, a fireworks party is approaching

Unlike last two times, the advance was mainly caused by technology advancement, the next wave will be driven by combined mining technology improvement and credit expansion when bitcoin can be mortgaged through ETF

The demand is rising about 4x year over year, I can feel it on localbitcoins, which is the most accurate measure of the true volume (You never know how much bots are trading on those large exchanges)

And supply is drying up quickly after many people can't even mine the coin to cover electricity cost, they shut down the rigs and start to  buy coins. Now new coins are concentrated to those large mining farms with high efficiency rigs and low electricity cost, they have dominated the production and limit the coin supply on market like OPEC

John Law's fiat money crashed because his paper money is backed by gold. And people redeemed gold coin with all those paper money during a panic, when there was no gold coin left, his paper money lost backing and worth nothing


But USD is backed by debt. People can not redeem USD for bond since there is no convertibility, only FED decide if they would like to purchase bond or sell bond, not individual USD holders

And most of the USD is hold in some of the bank account, which is strictly controlled by the banks, people can not withdraw a lot of USD cash to cause a bank run

Unless there is a large amount of dump of USD for something else more credible, I don't see how it is possible for USD to fail. Maybe bitcoin as a more trust worthy currency will weaken it, but not in any foreseeable future

It is almost impossible for money to crash (During a crisis, everyone is looking for money), and USD is obviously regarded as the most stable form of money. However, if many powerful people are getting tired by being robbed by FED, they might start some action, a currency war might be the first step

I simply tell my friends, now I only send money to my relatives abroad through bitcoin exchanges, it can be done in a couple of hours, which is much faster and cheaper than international bank transfer

And another answer with much steeper learning curve:
Henry Ford: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

Actually since the majority of coins are mined in the first 8 years, which give early adopter a large advantage, some people think this is a pump and dump scheme

If the shrink of supply is more gradual, not 50% each 4 years, but 33%, or 25%, it would still have limited total supply, the coin distribution will be more evenly spread out over time. However, that would also mean that there will be heavy inflation during first 20 years of the bitcoin introduction, so that it will take much longer time to reach the claimed deflative currency status, maybe too long to show any advantage over fiat money, thus failed before it reach mainstream adoption

With current scheme, the inflation will drop quickly below 4% after 2016 reward halving, thus already reach a parity with fiat money under normal situation, after that it is all uncharted water  

The current problem is not lacking of business that provides real value, in fact there are too many of them and they are going bankrupt because people don't have enough money to spend. Increase the bitcoin price will give people more money to spend, thus save those businesses 

Just like creating more USD will stimulate economy, higher bitcoin value will stimulate economy too 

Money supply increase a couple of percent per year until 2008, and then went out of control

It is not paranoid if people can accept a couple of percent tax each year by inflation, but now it is 500% tax in a couple of years. Stockholm syndrome maybe 

Good observation. In fact the efficiency has increased by thousands of times since the invention of electronics and computer, and working hours increased, but the living condition has not improved by thousands of times at all, where have all those added productivity gone

It is funny that the more money they need, the more right they give central banks to enslave them

From central bank's point of view: People desperately need me to print some paper to enslave them, without these paper they will die

How come people leave their fate in the hands of a printing press? Maybe because there are used to be something special that this printing press can provide: Trust

I think he misunderstood the meaning of machine to machine transactions: Today's internet transactions or ATM only accept human inputs, not from another machine, machine won't be able to transfer money to each other without human authorization from each bank, but with bitcoin, each machine can have its own wallet, and they could just send each other bitcoins without human interference, like AIs carrying out financial activities

Please check the meaning of slavery. By definition, slavery emphasizes the idea of complete ownership and control by a master. Since central banks completely own and control every newly created fiat money, and in turn those money is going to exchange for all your products/services, you are a slave of central bank

Food, education etc is different, because unlike central bank creating money out of nothing, no one can get the initial ownership of food and education without putting similar worth of work/resources. The exchange for food is normal commercial activities, the relationship between you and food producer is just business partner, but the relationship between you and central bank is slave and master

This

They need some very simple and intuitive slides or video that can explain the whole thing in a couple of minutes. So far Mike Maloney's work is best, but still take lots of effort to grasp since he blended the concept IOU in his explanation. Once IOU is involved, most of the people start to lose their financial direction

As long as people trust USD and use it to measure value, the debt can always be paid back by printing USD. For most of the people, including people in other countries, that trust is almost unshakeable. So debt is the least to worry about

Sure, banks have printed 5x more USD and diluted the USD value dramatically, but for average people, they will never raise the price of their products/services based on USD money supply, their pricing is depends on cost and competition, and since we have continuous improvement over efficiency due to automation and computer, the price might even drop

The demand exists in many different area, but just like on FOREX, 70-90% of currency trading volume is related to speculation. So when some whale start to drive a speculative wave, the price and demand will all go up

It took only 300 million dollar to buy all the coins on market (about 1 million), any hedge fund with a little bit size are able to start a tsunami. However they need some official channel, wait for some official exchanges

Another issue is the safety, unless through ETF, those investors will have a hard time to keep their coins safe, this is the biggest concern right now

Similar to diamond dealers lock up most of the diamonds and sell only a few at high price