We need less investing and speculation and more actual real work application.
True. Bitcoin was originally envisioned as a sort of petty cash system for the Internet. But it's never been widely adopted for that. If you could buy iTunes songs or Amazon videos or even MMORPG game items for Bitcoins (directly from the vendor, not through some intermediary), then Bitcoin would have widespread use. That was a key idea - no need for a payment intermediary for small payments.
Instead, we have a speculative commodity. We also have one of the flakiest collection of vendors ever seen in any industry. Most Bitcoin exchanges are either crooked or incompetent. The "online wallet" operations are worse. Even the people selling mining hardware act like flakes, with "pre-orders" and similar crap. This is embarrassing.
The problem is that Bitcoin makes possible unidirectional, irrevocable money transfers between distant anonymous parties. This is the con man's dream. If they can't find you, they can't send cops or goons after you. Too many crooks have realized that.
Well, now we know what's wrong. Next time, the system has to have some way that A can send money to B, but it's held in an intermediate state until a second event where A commits the transaction and releases the money to B when they receive whatever B was supposed to send them. ("Escrow agents" haven't helped. Some of them are crooks, too. This needs to be part of the transfer protocol.)
Credit cards have a two-phase commit system like that. It's not that visible to end users, but you see it at gas pumps, where reading the card locks up some of your funds but doesn't transfer them to the gas station. Only at the end of the transaction, after the gas has been pumped, does the transaction commit.
