I am in the U.S. as well. The point is that the USD is so convenient because you can go almost anywhere in the world and either use it directly or easily trade for the local currency. That's the goal of Bitcoin. Why would I ever want to acquire Euros or Rupees while I was in the U.S.? The only value of these other currencies is when it is *more* convenient for trade than USD. If you want to speculate on the relative value of currencies, you can open up a forex account online. Foreign exchange is probably the most competitive and efficient type of trading in the world.

If I am going to a foreign country for vacation for a week, I will buy the local currency out of necessity; thus, a $4 fee might be acceptable, especially since you can withdraw a lot more than $100.

I suppose bitinstant is a good tradeoff between money and time. I know none of my friends would ever go through all the steps to do it the secure and inexpensive way, and if I told them to pay a 4% fee they would ask me why they should buy an experimental currency and lose 4% off the bat. That means buying bitcoins and selling back into dollars would cost 8%, which is unthinkable in the investment realm.

Typical exchanges are pretty easy.   In a European country I can walk up to an ATM and get Euros after paying $4 or so in fees.  Or I can use a Capital One credit card and pay no fees.  Most websites I've seen accepts USD via credit card.  However, if I wanted to get $100 worth of Yen, then I admit it would probably be pretty difficult.

One of the things I like about bitcoin is that once it's there, it's very cheap to move money between addresses.


I read that it can take several minutes for a transaction to propagate across the network; if that's not true, then maybe it's not an issue. If zero-confirmation transactions can be handled with a manageable level of risk, then it would be pretty cool to see bitcoin hit the retail scene. I wonder: do we have statistics on documented cases of double-spends which have cost people money?

Well, since I'm a prisoner in this Newbie forum, I'll post my thoughts on Bitcoin. I've been watching bitcoin for over a year now.  Last summer I was fairly convinced that the game was over after the crash; that bitcoin would die a natural death when people realized it had no backing.

Then a month ago I logged back in to check on the price of bitcoins.. back up over $10! To me, this has proven that the bitcoin experiment has succeeded.  I've done a lot of reading on these forums and elsewhere.  A lot of people are disillusioned because they think this experiment proves that
a) libertarianism falls victim to greed, causing bitcoin volatility.
b) bitcoin hoarding is a problem.
c) bitcoin isn't fair.

Volatility is necessary until the market gets much larger for bitcoins. Regardless of how saint-like the market participants are, someone will always want to make a profit via arbitrage, loans, hoarding, etc. That is necessary for any market to function. Without speculators and hoarders, we'd probably still be at $.10 prices with wild hourly fluctuations due to the small volumes involved.

Stating that early adopters have an unfair advantage is silly; why should we call something unfair if people accomplish something while adhering to the rules of the game? How much more fair could bitcoin be when participants *must* agree on the rules to the game from day 1 in order for the software to work? Anyone smart enough to obtain bitcoins legally during the early days should be commended for their foresight, and our ignorance was our own fault.

To me, the biggest bitcoin barrier appears to be the difficulty of buying bitcoins. You have all these steps:
1. Download the client and wait a couple days for it to sync.
2. Create a dwolla account. Setup ACH transfers.
3. Transfer money to dwolla.
4. Setup mtgox account. Verify mtgox account.
5. Transfer money from dwolla to mtgox.
6. Buy bitcoins from mtgox.
7. Transfer bitcoins to personal encrypted wallet file because we don't trust the exchanges.

Or you can cut out some steps using bitinstant when paying higher fees. This is so complicated as to seem like a pyramid scheme or hoax. Nonetheless, I am very impressed with the community of users, the depth of discussion about economics, and the fact that bitcoin is soon to surpass the 4-year mark!

I am particularly interested to see what will happen on the first "halving-day".. this is certainly an amazing economic experiment. From the practical side, I have a hard time seeing how bitcoin can be used in real-time exchanges due to the time it takes to get 0-6 confirmations; however, perhaps bitcoin could be used on a large scale for Internet purchases in the future.