We would also love to see people be able to buy food from their favourite grocery store with bitcoin. Let's make it happen! Which grocery store should we approach? I'm guessing an online, nation-wide, grocery store may make the most sense. They could use Unocoin's merchant gateway to process their orders. By processing their orders through Unocoin, the business can have their clients' bitcoin turned into INR deposited into their bank account in less than 24 hours.
Let's get a list together of all the merchants we would like to see accepting bitcoin in 2015. I'll get it started...
1) Airtel
2) Flipkart
3) Ola
4) Cleartrip
5) ?
See here for more details:
https://www.unocoin.com/merchantsI'd prefer to see bitcoin merchants coming up rather than FIAT giants accepting bitcoin as it will only result in heavy dumping and thereby will bring down the bitcoin price. An alternative of Airtel in Bitcoin world is not readily possible and I have never heard of Ola. But, Flipkart and Cleartrip alternatives are definitely possible on top of a solely bitcoin economy.
Thanks for your comments, much appreciated. After having been in the bitcoin scene for a couple years now, I've come to the conclusion that the price of bitcoin is really one of the least exciting aspects of bitcoin. Once you come to term with the fact that bitcoin is the internet of money, or that it is digital gold, or that it is an *almost* free protocol for value transfer, or that its a million other amazing things, that's when the fun begins.
See, large merchants in India will benefit directly by accepting bitcoin. By accepting bitcoin, they may reduce the number of fraud charges occurring online down to zero. How amazing is that?
They may also reduce their cost down to zero (whereas credit card companies often charge upward of 2 or 3%).
So as you can see, by having a large merchant like Microsoft or Dell accept bitcoin, it DOES create downward pressure on the bitcoin price, you are right. But at the same time, there is an ever growing demand for bitcoin. People are buying bitcoin like never before, and this trend will continue because companies like Microsoft and Dell are accepting bitcoin. So bitcoin has become this entity which serves multiple purposes for different people.
Regarding price, I recommend that people not put more than 1% of their total wealth into bitcoin. Keep in mind that bitcoin is still very early and very experimental. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose. Having said that, in the next 10 years, I still reckon that the price of each bitcoin will be multiple orders of magnitude higher than what it is today. I say this because once large scale financial institutions get involved, once the average person is easily able to put a little bit of their investment portfolio into bitcoin, then we'll have the next upward spike. When that'll take place? Who knows...