While there is no doubt demand for bitcoin in the developed world, I think there could be tremendous demand in the third world or in countries currently experiencing high inflation or where there is little faith in the currency. Vietnam, Venezuela, Angola and Afghanistan come to mind. While I fully support the P2P distributed nature of the bitcoin network, one of the challenges in these areas is the lack of access to infrastructure capable of supporting P2P networks. What people in these countries do have are cellphones. I've often thought that people's cell phones (either via apps or telephone numbers) could connect to a central bitcoin wallet to facilitate exchanges. These wallets would be necessary to facilitate exchanges, but the fundamental network would remain a P2P distrubuted one.

My 0.02 BTC

Thanks for the quick reply. I agree with you. For the time being it seems like bitcoin adoption will be a very slow and gradual process.

Perhaps one way of accelerating the process might be to entice vendors though higher margins. Do you think sufficient community commitment exists to the ideals of the bitcoin that people will consider paying slightly more for bitcoin products? Nothing would attract a supplier more than knowing they could make more money in bitcoins than in fiat...

Are people willing to part with their bitcoins, with the intent of starting an economy, even if that means paying a higher price?

Hello all,

I'd like to begin my first post by saying that I'm thrilled to discover that so many people are working on a new monetary system that avoids the fraud of fractional reserve banking and a debt based monetary system.

After spending the last few days studying bitcoin, it appears that for a fully functioning bitcoin economy to develop vendors will be needed to supply goods and services. My question is: what will attract vendors to bitcoin?

Right now it appears to me that most transactions (if not all) are of the form: fiat currency -> bitcoin -> fiat currency. By this I mean the alpaca sock vendor has not truly adopted bitcoin, but is rather using them as a transfer medium. The buyer of socks is (forget mining for the moment) converting fiat to bitcoin then purchasing the socks. The vendor accepts Bitcoin but then immediately pays out expenses (labour, fuel, materials) in fiat. A fully functioning bitcoin economy will require the consumer to be paid in bitcoin and the vendor to pay expenses in bitcoin. The sock vendor needs suppliers that will accept bitcoins. The consumer needs an employer that pays in bitcoin. Governments get the system created by creating laws that people blindly follow.

How does this economy get bootstrapped?

Ralisse