Just finished reading through this thread. This is the most important and concise post:
There are three stages:
Merchants not accepting bitcoins.
Merchants accepting bitcoins but converting them immediately to fiat.
Merchants accepting them and keeping a bitcoin holding.
This is a progression which must be undergone before Bitcoin can reach a plateau as a widespread and significant currency and payments system. It says a lot that the argument is moving from the inane Bitcoin "scam/ponzi/laugh" to Bitcoin "can't be successful as it is swapped for fiat after use". It means that the detractors are losing ground.
Very well said, thank you.
For more insight into the evolution and inevitable global adoption of cryptocurrency, I highly recommend watching
Bitcoin the organism, Jeff Garzik at TEDxBinghamtonUniversity.
Also, a reading of the
History of the Internet wikipedia page will prove fruitful.
Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more.
The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.[1] Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.
"Almost instant in historical terms" is what happens when a decentralized, democratic, organicly adaptive, mathematics-based solution comes along for a problem that was formerly,
and poorly, addressed by some ancient, industrial-age centralized solution.
Now class, who can tell me what these all have in common?
- Pre-internet telecom networks
- Blockbuster video
- The Newspaper
- The record store
and the newest member of the list:
- Nation-state fiat currency
Let's put aside the problems of fiat inflation and hyper-inflation for now. On your own time, study root causes of WWII,
Weimar republic. Hint: fiat hyperinflation to pay war debt.
The point is, a vast, labyrinthe system of interconnected centralized national banks is an
over-engineered solution to the problem of trust. Good engineering is not what you add, it's what you remove. The blockchain's power as a technological superforce is rooted in the brilliant
simplicity of the mathematics under the hood. This is Occam's razor at work.
Very simply put, cryptocurrency is a better way of doing money. I'm sorry, boys and girls, but there will be no epic battle for the fate of money.
This fight was over before it even began. We early adopters are going to
drink your fiat milkshake, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.
That's why a few of us with even tens of BTC in cold storage know we are already set for life.
For those of you paying attention, the answer is yes, you should probably divest from your nation's fiat into the safe haven of the crypto of your choice, ASAP.
This is going to be over very quickly. Dangerously quickly... Once we've got ~10% global adoption, shit will get serious. I'm talking permanent exponential growth, it could be all over in months or days.
Impossible to know when or how long, but it will happen sooner or later.
[The internet] only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007
1993-2007.
1% - 97%
14 years.
Four years later, BAM! Cryptocurrency is invented.
I think most of you folks are not comprehending how
short a length of time
four years is, when weighed against the
magnitude of the innovation that is cryptocurrency.
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-tc8RJQno6tQ%2FUfHhBEVTatI%2FAAAAAAAAATY%2Fmaam-EUkF7I%2Fs1600%2Fgraph.gif&t=665&c=X0yCzD6PAVFZWA)
The waves are getting shorter every generation.
The beginning is near.
http://www.ctetrailblazers.org/2012/06/technology-changes-everything-computers.html