Topic: bitcoins are great!!! any body who thinks they will fail please tell me why. (Read 1274 times)

Bitcoin are already useful, but not for everything.

One thing they are useful? If you play a mmo you can sell ingame currency for bitcoin and then use bitcoins to buy other things like games or anything else is sold for bitcoins. You want Battlefield 3? Sell some gold for bitcoin and you buy it.

I think the potential benefits of "when we get there" are obvious. I don't think there is a well enough argument for the current state of Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is not about the current state of affairs at all, it's unfair to expect it to deliver at this stage. It's akin to calling a revolution pointless merely because the revolutionary struggle is hard.

One of the worst things about human society is that we get stuck at local minima and go deeper and deeper, ever specializing. We can almost never jump from our current focus to something completely different and better. It's obvious for social structure, but can also be observed in technology. Now that we have a bloated banking system, what we can practically do is create structures that can play well with it, like Paypal. Banking is hard, what Paypal does is even harder, and further layers can only get more complicated. It's so complicated that only highly specialized people can understand how it works as a whole (and I'm not taking the underlying technologies into account). We know that if people used a system like Bitcoin or Ripple, things could be much much better (no guarantees though), but the path of evolution from here to there is far from apparent and is probably not very convenient.

So, is it rational to stay and support the current system? Depends on what "rationality" is actually. I'd say that it's enlightened self interest to support the idea of Bitcoin, but probably not immediate self interest.

EDIT: Sorry, the topic was whether it would fail, not if it is a good idea. Well, great ideas fail all the time... The real world is a dark, sinister place.

Paypal would would care if the money was withdrawn to a different currency and would probably freeze it. Mt Gox would only make you wait 3 weeks to withdraw all the money.

Or you do the same with PayPal. 

You set up account on an exchange with $20,000 worth of Bitcoin. You sent the 'partner' the account login so he can withdraw it to his account (commission), then you report the transaction on your taxes as a business expense.  

How?
I have $20,000 that I want to send to someone in Russia as payment. Then I transfer money to some entity, (dwolla?, that takes commission?) and on to MtGox (that takes commission?), I then buy coins at market prices that will go up when I place a large buy order. I have no way to insure against value drop, so I'm at the mercy of market forces here.
The coins are then transferred to my russian business partner, who places those coins for selling on MtGox (another commission), prices then drop due to a large sell order, and he then moves whatever he sells to whatever entity can withdraw from MtGox (another commission) and finally from the bank (commission?).

Is this simpler? Are you sure it's cheaper?

Bitcoin might have a place, but it's a long way there. And the benefits aren't obvious. Quite the contrary.

Trolling or stupid?

What does the success of Bitcoin have to do with exchange rate?

They've already failed. (See echange rates.) But noone can tell you whether they will rise again.

26yrs old

More people use bitcoins, more people keep bitcoins.

How old are you?

Bitcoins are the world's first peer to peer, distributed electronic currency. This means that they can be sent directly from person to person over the internet, without needing anyone's help or permission. They are free to send, receive, or to store, and they can be as public or anonymous as you want them to be.

With bitcoins, a person in California can send $20,000 USD worth of value to a person in Russia in a matter of seconds, for FREE.

In comparison: Paypal would cost about $600, and take a few seconds. Credit card would cost about $600 and take a few days, to a week, or more. Bank wire would cost about $40, and take one or two days.

By all of the traditional payment methods, any government can block your transaction for any arbitrary reason.
Because Bitcoins are peer to peer, no one can block your transaction for any reason, ever. A recent example of this property of Bitcoin being put to use, is with the online gambling industry.
Recently the USA Federal government blocked credit card companies and banks from being allowed to process gambling related transactions.
Since then, numerous online gambling sites that use Bitcoins have launched.
Because Bitcoins are sent over a distributed, peer to peer network, governments are powerless to stop them.

With traditional government issued currencies, politicians are always tempted to just print more whenever they have a budget short fall due to the most recent war, bailout, or “stimulus” package. When governments do this, all the citizen’s savings lose value in real terms. With Bitcoins, governments can never take the value of your money in this way. Because the software is open source, we know that there will never ever be more than twenty one million Bitcoins. No one will be able to provide themselves with additional bitcoins by decree, as happens so often with traditional government issued currencies.

Bitcoins are also resistant to government tracking or seizure. With just a few steps, anyone can store their bitcoins in such a way that governments or other theives are powerless to access them without the correct password.

Bitcoins may also make paying most taxes voluntary since governments will lose the power to track or control who sends bitcoins to whom. The IRS, DEA, Customs and Border Patrol, and other agencies will no longer be able to seize peoples money at will.

Bitcoins may also bring an end to war. Currently governments force all of their citizens to pay for war efforts whether they are in favor of the war or not. Once Bitcoin use is wide spread, the people in favor of the wars will no longer be able to force the people against the wars to pay for them.
If suddently, the half the population who does not support the wars stop paying for them, it will quickly become much more expensive for the suppoters of war to continue funding it. I suspect that many people who claim to be in favor of the current wars would change their mind if they had to pay for all of it themselves.

Because Bitcoins are limited to 21,000,000 and they have so many advantages over traditional government issued currencies,
once even a small percentage of the economy begins using bitcoins, the price will quickly soar to thousands of dollars per Bitcoin or more.