It is highly impractical to spend gold to buy things.
Well, I guess that explains why it was used as the world's currency for thousands of years. Thank GOD, fiat came along and fixed that horrible situation.
Matt, I like you, but try not to speak out of your ass.
If you really me, help me to understand by using logical facts. I'm not going to be a dick and quite the dictionart for what "practical" means, but I'll say that your response didn't change my opinion whatsoever. I didn't say it's useless (I use it daily). I said it's impractical for various reasons still and I didn't get a counter argument to that yet, so I have no reason to assume my logic is flawed yet.
You implied that the reason bitcoin is impractical is the fact that it's essentially a digital commodity, not it's admittedly manifold other issues. Commodity money has historically been the only sound money. The primary impracticality with bitcoin is it's volatility. I feel that will taper off with time. Patience, Daniel-san. It's not, nor has it ever been impractical to buy things with gold. Eventually, it will not be impractical to buy things with Bitcoin.
Ah, so basically we're on the same page then, I was just focusing on the wrong point. Okay, then even though I still think it's impractical to carry around gold, I will remove that as one of my arguments and focus on volatility, requirement for "mining", ease of price manipulation, multiple major points of social failure (mtGox, Github, etc) instead. hehe.
Most of which will fade as the community and economy grows, and the only one of those that won't go away, I view as a feature, not a bug, so.... *shrug* (seriously, though, we
need to focus on decentralizing the currency exchange thing. That really should be priority one right now. That will help greatly with eliminating volatility, manipulation, and a major point of failure.)