Help me explain/promote bitcoin to the regular joe.

[bitcoinspot.nl]

Hi there y'all!
Just a quick post from the netherlands.

I was just wondering if we can make up a good case for the regular joe bag-o-donuts to use bitcoins.

For me there are multiple reasons, like the technology, the bank-independence, the absence of fees,
but every time i try to explain it to the regular person they say: "well, i have a creditcard, that works great for me,
i can do international transactions with it, i can take back my payment if it goes wrong and the fees aren't that high."

So for me the problem is that i can explain why i would like to use it, and why a merchant would like to use it but i myself cant find a really good reason for the average person on the street to use it.

Help me out here! (please )

[niko]

Perhaps this is not the best time...

[The_Duke]

It is impossible to get the average joe in the netherlands to understand bitcoins. The only thing it's really good for is to easily and safely buy drugs. And guess what, they don't need bitcoin for that in the netherlands.

[niko]

Let me elaborate: if you search this forum you'll find several good threads where people compared and contrasted Bitcoin with current credit cards point-of-sale (POS) POS infrastructure. The conclusion was over that, overall, Bitcoin would be a better option for the merchant. Mostly due to fees and chargebacks. Besides POS, there is the international money transfer. Piece of cake with Bitcoin even today, as long as there are exchanges available (since you can't really spend Bitcoin directly). There is also Bitcoin as a store of value - much like gold.
That's all great, but the fact is that we are comparing very preliminary or even non-existent Bitcoin solutions to well-established banking infrastructure. So, it may be too early to promote Bitcoin. Doing so before the community addresses some fundamental challenges (ref. Kaminsky, for example) and before robust infrastructure has been demonstrated might do more harm than good. From what I see some are working hard on all this, and you may not have to wait long.

[d.james]

buy buy buy, it may reach $1000+ next year...