I'm glad investment value is far in the lead on this poll. At least I know this forum mostly gets it, unlike many on reddit.
A few odds and ends from comments above:
- "Fees too expensive for microtransactions" - fees are wildly overinflated now because there's no easy price discovery mechanism (and because they're still so low that few people care; some people are just statically extrapolating into the future, isolating one variable and assuming nothing else will change when that variable changes (there needs to be a name for this error)). Once clients incorporate a fee bidding mechanism, fees will fall to their free market level. Since frictionless free markets ruthlessly drive profits toward zero, fees should end up very slightly higher than the actual cost to a miner of processing the particular transaction.
- "We already have gold for a store of value" - gold is not instantly, invisibly, deniably, unconfiscate-ably transferable across borders or stored. The physicality of gold has a few advantages as well, but absolutely Bitcoin offers extremely unique and useful functions that gold can never have. Functions that the wealthy and oppressed will be particularly interested in. Bitcoin is a total game-changer in the multi-trillion-dollar offshore account industry.
- "People buying just because the price is rising is bad" - to a degree, but 1) those people have to familiarize themslves with Bitcoin in order to buy and to know when to make trades, which helps adoption (at least until Second Market introduces liquidity in the BIT by March 2014, though that's only for wealthy investors), and 2) there's a giant difference between price-chasing speculation and long-term Bitcoin-believer buy-in based on the correct ascertainment of Bitcoin's future transactional use value.
The latter is very healthy because such people are strong hands who drive the price up and only sell when necessary and usually only into massive parabolic rallies, helping to blunt them, meanwhile raising market cap (and therefore stability) and overall Bitcoin user base and familiarity, which loops back into increased transactional use. Also, as seen in March/April, the newly wealthy often prefer - for both convenience and tax reasons - to spend bitcoins instead of selling them, making price rise periods the best for merchants, even if they instantly convert to fiat.
Here's a
MUST READ post that does a better job of explaining why store-of-value is the main utility of Bitcoin, and how that works to boost transactional value, etc. Some very subtle points are made that I couldn't find the right wording for here.
