Yeah both points you highlighted are really good and i completely forgot about localbitcoins.com this way you can hide the identity but again this is an alternative not a solution, what you say?
converting fiat to bitcoins to buy things. or converting bitcoins to fiat to buy things is not what bitcoins are all about.. what you are taking about is the gateway services, not bitcoin itself..
bitcoin can be compared to bank notes. when paid in bank notes and buying things with bank notes, businesses do not need or care about identity. yet if you went to an exchange service to swap bank notes of $ for euro's then things get complicated where if you request more then $1000 the exchange starts to get interested in who you are.
i have an income that is fully bitcoin (no conversion) i pay my bills in bitcoin so i never need to hand over my details. and thats what bitcoin is about. not the exchanges
So the only advantage of using bitcoins is the anonymity factor? Was that the only reason to have this crypto currency?
For me it's the fact that the currency can be converted into fiat and trading in it earns me a profit if the price increases. I don't bother much about the anonymity.
its not about anonymity.. its about not needing to convert.
after all if you are american. do you even give a crap if there was a UK bank that needed your life history just to convert dollars to pounds.. no.. all you care about is that you can go to your local shop and hand over dollar bank notes and get goods for them without needing to show ID.
the argument is not about bitcoin conversion. it is about bitcoins usefulness AS BITCOIN.
for instance imagine a world where we all used gold. and someone invented a technology that gold was weightless so that we did not have to store it in banks in exchange for receipts that we swapped with people.
getting paid gold and knowing you can hand gold to people without converting it into bank paper is what is good about bitcoin. if all you care about is the value of bank paper and increasing bank paper. your missing the point of bitcoin.
its like you are american and you want to buy euros, not to buy things from places that accept euro's. not to convince businesses to accept euro's but purely to find ways to increase your dollars.
to me you might aswell go trade on stock and currency markets as you are not interested in bitcoin for bitcoins true purpose