Your points smell like all the other people hoping to get rich quick off of Bitcoin.
Implying that I didn't get "rich quick" off of Bitcoin.
Yes, the other methods are a multi billion dollar industry, what does that have to do with anything? They are much more efficient and scalable than Bitcoin. Did you know that Visa alone (forget other credit card companies) handles as many transactions in 3 minutes as all the Bitcoin transactions in a day? The blockchain would collapse if it were put to any real use.
You said people need to start comparing it to other payment methods, which is a multi-billion dollar industry. If it can compete, and it does, you can ascertain that it has the potential to be a player in said multi-billion dollar industry.
VISA was founded in 1958. Do you really think they were processing 2,000 transactions per second in 1964? Give your head a shake. Let's see how the two compare taking a snapshot of Visa today, and Bitcoin in the year 2057.
Yes, several hours for 6 confirmations. I use MultiBit as my wallet, and it takes ages to pay for anything. People will not want to wait even 5 minutes to pay for anything in a physical location.
Several means >2. Considering that there should be ~6 blocks per hour, yet for the better part of the last year the difficulty has been rising means you're wrong. We know you're wrong because we have the empirical evidence that says so.
So you
chose to use a client that doesn't work worth a shit and somehow that's indicative of the market as a whole? SMH. And surely you've never actually tried to use BTC to pay for anything, because if you had you'd know that it happens near instantaneously. In the physical world I can pay for something with BTC just as fast as I can with a card. At least with BTC with merchant knows with a reasonable margin of certainty that they aren't going to be ripped off within 10 minutes instead of finding out 30 days later someone charged back that purchase. But IMO Bitcoin was never really intended to fulfill the role of in person purchases, and in the online world I can pay with BTC much faster than I can with a CC, and that is fact.
Chargebacks is a huge con for consumers. This is actually one of the reasons Bitcoin will never get even 5% of the worlds population to use it.
Maybe, maybe not. How many times have you actually had to charge back something? People like to make it out as if this is some sort of deal breaker, but in my entire life, I've only had to initiate a chargeback once, and I probably didn't even have to do that if I was patient enough for the merchant in my case to take care of their business. I'll concede that having the
option of chargeback is nice, but for what I'd consider most cases, it's a non-issue.
Illegal goods is a billion dollar industry. It just happens to be Bitcoins main use, whereas its not the dollars.
And what's your point? If it can't buy drugs, porn, and facilitate gambling, it's not money. You might as well just claim that all Bitcoin users are criminals just because Roger Ver is a felon and is a well known pro-bitcoin spokesman.