I didnt necessarily mean the recent drop, but overall lackluster usage growth. Maybe everyone here just thinks that btc will catch on overnight, no that it hasn't gained a lot of popularity, but it seems that with all the money going into the btc infrastructure, it would have spread further than it has. My other point was that long term, it looks like apps like this will catch on much faster than bitcoin due to their ease of use, and it could be a negative effect on btc usage.
I don't, personally, think it'll catch on overnight. Maybe it'll never catch on to the point we'd like it to, it's entirely possible.
I think a major problem with bitcoin is that it doesn't really solve a problem that most people have. By people, I mean the majority of people, the consumers, people who buy stuff. It's a huge asset for businesses, of course, because they don't have to worry about charge backs and all that jazz, but it also introduces other problems for said businesses. Most businesses still pay most of their bills in fiat, which is why they use the bitcoin -> fiat conversion for the most part. One problem businesses would have with bitcoin is returns: there are probably gonna be people wanting to return whatever they bought. Do you give them their bitcoins back at the exact bitcoin amount they bought the item to you and incur an exchange rate risk / benefit, or choose to make it the fiat value of what it was at the time of purchase?
You're quite right, apps like this are easier to use than bitcoin. The interview on
insidebitcoins.com had a great point. Yeah, usability sucks right now, and it talked about a service that abstracts out the public key of people's bitcoin addresses to people to make it much easier to send someone money. Which is a great idea, it's like creating a domain name system for bitcoins like there is for the internet so you don't have to manually type in IP addresses to get to websites. Of course, for this to really work well, this system have to have at least a double abstraction layer so that it would point to a whole wallet full of bitcoin addresses, not just one wallet address, in the same way that a major website like Google is served from a different server depending on where you are in the world.
Anyway, I guess you could say my point is give it time. People are creating apps to make bitcoin easier to use too. Remember, fiat's been around for hundreds of years (in the current incarnation anyway), bitcoin has only existed since 2009. I'd say the growth in bitcoin use since then given the relatively short time period is pretty amazing personally.
