Topic: Bitcoin will be ready for mainstream adoption when.... (Read 2344 times)

They will not be "stable". The fiat itself is not stable, it fluctuates against other fiat currencies and are suspectible to inflation. The Bitcoin value are determined by supply and need, the supply is fixed, the need will increase with increase in adoption. The stability is not mandatory, if Bitcoins are used as medium of transfer, the price stability matters only if they are used for speculation and hoarding.

Even if Bitcoins become outright illegal in some countries, they can't take away the coins without taking away the freedom of computing. The online wallets will suffer from this, and that's only online wallets. Any price change when legal status changes are pure specualtion.

If we are talking mainstream.

When price is stable.
When Bitcoins are legal?

Most average people probably dont want their online wallet to become illegal or to suddenly drop 10-50% in value.

People start seeing nonprofit organizations accepting Bitcoin over and over and over and over and over...again.

1. Any third party cannot be trusted. I trust only My Computer. Online wallet in time will become evil like PayPal.

2. There is so called Merkele tree. Read Satoshi whitepaper about that.

Bitcoin already is success. The goods I purchased on SR was from coins I hacked. So no exchange was involved. In fact Bitcoin is great, now I look in %appdata%/Bitcoin first rather than My Documents / My Pictures.

Bitcoin is ready for mainstream. Only mainstream does not need Bitcoin yet. It's just like Credit Cards, they where around since 60-ties, but not everyone used them.

When kids in school start the practice of memorizing long authentic passphrases.

or/and

Banks/exchanges offering insurance.

There are security issues with all the technologies that have a server-side. Even if they don't have the private key, they could still send fake data to your client which makes you do something stupid. This problem applies to both clients that have a server and the so called secure web wallets. People should be careful when using them.

This issue is much less critical than if the server had the private key because the window of opportunity is so much smaller. If for example, StrongCoin was hacked, people would know about it very fast. The news would be all over the place. After a while no one would use StrongCoin anymore and their coins would be safe. The window of opportunity is only a few hours at most before there are no unsuspecting users left to log on and use their coins.

This applies to all clients and services with a server-side, so it's wise to be careful with them even if they don't have access to your private key. Being careful applies to everything though. Even if you use your coins from an offline computer that has never seen Internet and it has an encrypted Bitcoin wallet in it, even that computer could have been locally hacked to have a keylogger in it. When it comes to security, there is no such thing as absolute security.

I would imagine that memorizing a private key to your head would be the safest possible way of storing bitcoins. And then memorizing a new one when you use it once. It would require high level memory skills to be able to store that kind of string to your memory and not forget it, so I wouldn't recommend it to most of us.

Although you would still have to use a computer to create the key, perhaps a completely formatted new installation that has never seen Internet, so you could make an encrypted backup with a unique one time password at the same time which allows you to forget the key and still have a backup. Creating the backup would be just as secure as creating the private key in the first place so it doesn't change anything. Can anyone even think of a way to be more secure than this with bitcoins?

This is an interesting idea. This could be pretty big actually, it's definitely worth a shot. But the whole exchange market is still in its infancy. I've seen plans for different types of p2p dark exchanges online as well, they are pretty interesting.

The main issue here is how to offer people knowledge and advice and easy ways to buy bitcoins using their native language. Most of the products and services are still only in English (or a few other major languages) and this is a significant obstacle. I'm in the process of starting a business which will provide everything a Finnish Bitcoin user needs, in Finnish. This includes a way to cheaply buy and sell bitcoins instantly using payment methods that people use every day in Finland.

Bitcoin enterpreneurs need to enter the markets of their home countries in an aggressive way. Build sites that have instructions in native language and services that allow people to buy and sell bitcoins in a convenient way. Use a lot of resources to MARKETING, because in the end that's all that matters.

The BitcoinJS solution seems pretty promising to me. They split the private key between the client and the server, so neither of these two alone can send bitcoin. When you send bitcoin you can have the server send you an SMS showing the amount and address you're sending to. That way, it seems even if you had a compromised client that would be 100% safe as long as the server itself is not hacked (and if the client was not compromised when you created the private keys).

I guess that BitcoinSpinner is an example that covers both of those without having to trust the provider not to run away with your funds.
However, IMO this is not enough for mainstream adoption. The biggest remaining problem is ease of converting fiat into BTC and vice versa and actually being able to buy stuff you would want to have.

I have been thinking about how we can solve this for some time (yes, I know I am probably not the first one to propose this, but here it comes):
In many ways you can regard a person running around with both his physical fiat wallet and his digital portable wallet as a micro exchange site. Maybe we can solve the conversion problem by combining GPS devices in mobile phones and the desire to buy/sell BTC. Basically you take your Next-Gen BitcoinSpinner app and advertise that you want to sell BTC. Anyone within a certain radius running a compatible portable app can see where you are, how to contact you, and what your price is. You meet up and do business.

I agree with Transisto and Shuai. Bitcoin needs time and there are a number of different issues that need improving before it will hit mainstream. What I personally think as the most important single issue, is marketing. Bitcoin itself, the tools people use in the Bitcoin economy and the merchants and organizations who accept Bitcoin need a lot more marketing. We need people to know about all of this. Everyone can help with this, just talk to people about it.

We have a technically superior payment system to anything out there. The tools for using it have been improving rapidly. There are already a lot of wallets that bypass the problem of a large blockchain, even for mobile phones! For desktops we have at least MultiBit and Electrum, probably more. For Android we have BitcoinSpinner and an Electrum based Android client is in development.

The other issue OP mentioned is storage. One of the main strong points of Bitcoin is that it doesn't require trust to 3rd parties for storing money or using money. I know there is demand for services like these but storing bitcoins in an exchange requires people to trust that 3rd party. I have no doubt that currently Mt. Gox is probably one of the safest centralized places to store coins, but it's still centralized. No worries though, there are already solutions to this problem!

Web wallets such as StrongCoin (https://strongcoin.com/) and the Blockchain.info wallet (https://blockchain.info/wallet) require very little trust. This is because the private keys to actually use those bitcoins are not stored in their servers. They only have an encrypted version of the key which is useless to anyone if a strong password was used. And when you create a wallet using these services they tell you exactly how strong your password is, so they are fairly user friendly as well. So it's already possible to use Web wallets in a very secure way.

Of course these are still vulnerable to your PC having keylogger trojans etc. and to combat this there are visual keyboards if you are paranoid about security. Even the visual keyboards could technically be hacked so I don't know if anyone has found a convenient way of using bitcoins with absolute 100% security, I doubt there is such a way. But we have come a LONG WAY from the fiasco of MyBitcoin, solutions such as StrongCoin are a major development.

Of course people can trust Mt. Gox and that might work out, but I would not recommend anyone storing all of their money in a place which requires 3rd party trust. Before Bitcoin, there were very few ways to store and use money without 3rd party trust but now there is, so TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT.

I still think that Rick Falkvinge's "4 hurdles of bitcoin" (or whatever it was called, something like that) from a while ago is the most accurate "bitcoins needs x, and THEN it will take off".

But honestly I think these circlejerks are moronic. This exact thread keeps popping up "Bitcoin NEEDS this and this before it can "take off". No fucking shit sherlock, if Google started accepting bitcoin it would help, but it's not the one and only thing that Bitcoin "needs". Anyway my point is: if you have any knowledge or ability or capital to do any of the things you just suggested, why don't you just go right ahead?

Let me tell you what Bitcoin "needs". It needs to grow organically over a long period of time, and THEN it will "take off". The great thing about this is that YOU can help with this! You can actually help Bitcoin improve on your own! This would include telling your friends about it, using it as a medium of exchange in trade, holding coins and buying them up when the price is cheap (if you believe in its long term viability), or even starting a bitcoin business/project. If you do any this, you are helping Bitcoin infinitely more than by going on the internet and calling out to all those altruistic programmers on Bitcointalk who are all standing by to jump on that one project that "will make Bitcoin take off".

My response to you was too big so I ended up writing something,

http://bitcoinmedia.com/86910565

No because, People might thing of it is a central part of bitcoin.

I think it need a bit more than that... Time

We need an economy based on much much more than USD <-> BTC
And this take time....

Currently almost every physical good purchased with BTC are in fact USD just purchased on an exchange.

Bitcoin will be ready for mainstream adoption when....

1) There are trusted wallet service websites.
IMHO the exchanges are the best candidates for this. They are basically already doing this with their websites. They have their exchange business to lose, so no incentive to just run away with the customer's bitcoins. Bitcoin.com as a wallet service would be good, since it's easy to remember. The websites must be easy to use of course.

2) There are blockchain services.
IMHO the Bitcoin program will not be useful for mainstream adoption simply because the blockchain is becoming too large and will become even larger and more unwieldy once Bitcoin goes mainstream. I myself don't even let the program run all the time but simply start when I need it.
The solution is to have trusted and secure blockchain services to which clients connect to. Something like bitcoinj or Electrum. The system should be secure even on a compromised computer (using split keys, separate trusted device to confirm transactions).


This will be the signal that Bitcoin will go big.