Bitcoin is in trouble.
You may not agree with me, but at least hear me out (or read me out, since this is being written).
For Bitcoin to succeed in the long run, it has to be widely adopted internationally, vendors, online retail companies, individuals, college students and your grandma all have to be able to use Bitcoin easily. The price can't be so volitile that it scares away regular folk. The price must be predictable enough that the factory in Vietnam will accept bitcoin for the products it is manufacturing for the market in Australia, and to pay for the raw material it gets from Brazil.
What can kill bitcoin is having no exchanges to buy bitcoin. Or, if regular people cannot easily transfer fiat currency into an exchange to buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin won't survive if the only way to trade it is in person from someone met online or through OTC trades on irc freenode #bitcoin-otc.
Unlike so many bitcoiners, I am not lent to believe in conspiracies. No, 9/11 was NOT an inside job. The CIA/Mossad/Freemasons did use plastic explosives to take down the WTC. On the other hand, with the loss of Bitfloor, and loss of Dwolla from MtGox due to direct court orders and various bank regulations clearly suggests that the government, or at least some regulators within the US government, are not keen on bitcoin.
Can't say I blame them. They do not understand Bitcoin. Bitcoin initially gained fame as being the medium through which illegal could be bought online. Bitcoin could be used to transfer large amounts of money from one part of the world to another. I can imagine some regulator sitting in some office becoming distressed that some American might leave the US not with $10,000 US in his suitcase, but with nothing in his suitcase but with $10,000 US in bitcoins in an online wallet to be retrieved once he gets to his foreign destination, avoiding all government regulation.
On the other hand, imagine a political dissident in Myanmar, Thailand, Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia who is asks for bitcoin donations for those of us who are better off and living in a free, democratic country, like Canada, or Australia, or even like my birthplace and home, The United States of America. We who are free and live in free democratic countries can send bitcoin to the wallet of some political dissident living in a non-free, undemocratic country and provide them with bitcoins to help them in the fight for freedom. See? Bitcoin can be used to make the world more free.
Of course, that is obviously a big threat to DHS or ICE or whichever agency was responsible for the recent events in the Bitcoin world.
Even if ownership of bitcoin was made illegal in the US, there is no way it could be stopped since bitcoin is decentralized, and is not located in any one location or country. Probably, it is legally impossible to make bitcoin illegal, but it is possible to restrict and control the flow of fiat from banks and individuals into a hosted exchange, thereby effectively, if not killing bitcoin, forcing it onto lifesupport.
In this article,
http://www.businessinsider.com/dwolla-mt-gox-2013-5, it is suggested that to encourage wide spread adoption of bitcoin, the move shoudl be to encourage charities to accept bitcoin. I admit, I myself would be more likely to send a bitcoin or fractional bitcoin to some charity's bitcoin address than go through the complex process of filling out a form to use my credit card to make a donation to some international charity. Also, with a credit card, you have to trust that the credit card number won't be stolen. So, let's imagine this scenario: A woman running a micro loan organization in Mexico (micro loans, giving small amounts like under $200 US to really poor women to start businesses) is encouraged to accept international donations via bitcoin. Ok, so she would have to find a way to convert the bitcoin to local currency, but it would give her access to donors far way in wealthier countries. And imagine that loads of small charities, and larger charities began accepting donations from all around the world in bitcoins. In the same way that pornography popularize VHS and even the Internet, I think that charities could popularize bitcoin. If bitcoin was widely adopted by charities and non-profits all over the world, it would make it much harder, on moral grounds, for governments to try to try to destroy bitcoin as a concept and movement. Besides, if many more small charities and non-profits adopted bitcoins it definitely would do lots of good on a global scale.
So, how do we get more world charities and non-profits to accept bitcoins? Personally, I think the Bitcoinfoundation AND all of us as individuals should spread the world, evangelize, if you will, the idea and promote and encourage our favorite charity, whether it is a politcal organization, a social service organization or a dog shelter or some NGO, to begin accepting Bitcoin. Both fortunately and unfortunately, no one person or group speaks for bitcoin. The Bitcoin Foundation, In my less than humble opinion, has some responsibility to push and promote bitcoin, but each of you, each of us, could suggest to each of our favorite non-profit to adopt bitcoin as a means of collecting donations from a wider worlwide audience.
