Over the past couple of weeks, the price of Bitcoin has remained relatively stable
Well, that is sort of true isn't it? After all, Bitcoin prices have been remarkably stable this year. I wonder if this is a sign that the currency has reached its maturation phase (I hope not!).
Here are some positive thoughts to restoke your optimism:
I think there's alot of room for growth yet, the whole user interface and experience still has a hacky homebrew feel to it, don't get me wrong I love it that way.
But for mass adoption people need chip/pin cards that they can use anyhwere, they dont want to even see a bitcoin address. Just a shiny card with logo on it that "just works" and keeps their savings safe.
Why use chip/pin cards, thats oldshool, why not just employ peoples existing phones (an app) duhh?.. Well employing users hardware introduces a MUCH larger attack surface for hacks. Plus the user psychology, they don't want to worry about the security of their phone, that's just hassle.
Of course the card comes with a paper document to be used in the event of card loss containing information required to recover balance and transfer to new posted out card via online account. Same account can be used for checking balance and maybe even converting fiat to coin.
But then the problem is incorporating this into the current mainstream system, the card readers at checkouts will need to be multi format capable, bank cards and also bitcoin.
Now the solution to this engineering problem is mainly software, a bitcoin card could be made to interface with existing chip/pin card hardware. So... the larger manufacturers of these machines might soon be tempted to make their machines multi-format, it would give them a slight but growing market edge, the cost being only the software dev.
Revenue would be neededThe beast would need food if it were to grow and survive in the mainstream. This could be accomplished in the form of transaction fees, so the miners get fees as they already do (a free market can exist between private miners and the card corp), plus the card corp get a tiny fee also. but no standing charges for the users, except for perhaps new card requests.
Card corps could compete, anyone could start one, free market competition would find a "natural" balance for users and card corps.
Regulation is inevitableCard users would need verification (binding to card), until we all get chipped it will have to be like opening bank account nowadays, signing in person with photoid etc. most governments would insist on this.
It's coming!The chance of this happening will increase every day provided bitcoin market cap continues to grow as it is. I think the price is holding well considering bitcoin is still in it's inflationary phase (still being mined).
When things like this start to happen, then crazy growth will begin. You would have to use a log price chart otherwise the growth to date would not show on the graph.
