Well I think that there will never be a day when everyone has a phone. If everyone could afford a phone, then everyone can afford food and a house. And if everyone is living in some utopia where there's no starvation or homelessness then why would we need a currency in the first place? Like I said,
70% of the world does not have Internet access. Kenya has only 28.08 million cell phones (CIA World Factbook) in a country of 44 million. That's only 63% of the population if each person has only one phone which is rare in Africa where phone services drop all the time.
Investing money in bitcoins?
Bitcoins are money. Fiat is
monopoly money. It will inflate naturally as more and more of it is printed off, and it will inflate with alarming rapidity as more and more people realize that they've been fooled. Even gold will lose it's value as people storing their value in gold will have so few advantages and so many disadvantages compared to people storing their value in bitcoin. It will naturally become the universal measure of value and we will someday look back upon the days of fiat with incredulity. Gold will naturally hold some of it's value but it has been replaced already, as it is no longer the overall best store of value on the market.
What did you purchase your first bitcoins with? More bitcoins?
Currently, bitcoins are not viable money. There isn't much you can buy with them. I can't buy gas or groceries with them, and those are necessary purchases. You can't argue with that. The biggest bitcoin market seems to be the silk road, which is far from and will never be mainstream.
I look at it this way--Fiat currency is so fundamentally flawed that holding your wealth in any fiat currency is a dangerous and risky "investment." Bitcoin is so fundamentally suited to being used as currency that it will undoubtedly become the universal standard for exchange. Therefore, switching from holding your wealth in fiat to holding your wealth in bitcoin is a near sure bet.
Explain to me why bitcoin is foolproof- you haven't so far. Explain why fiat money can collapse but bitcoins cannot. Bitcoins can be destroyed, much like fiat, however they are never reprinted. And like I said before, I don't have a choice but to invest in fiat. I don't want to starve.
Well, no fiat currency has ever been successful in history, I see no reason to expect the USD, Euro, Pound, or Yuan to do any better. In fact I think it's a near certainty that all of the above will reach a value of 0 in our lifetimes. Read
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/08/average-life-expectancy-for-fiat.html and
http://dailyreckoning.com/fiat-currency/ and maybe try the wikipedia entry for "fiat currency" and the dictionary entry for "fiat."
While bitcoin could plummet and never recover, I think it's far more probable that it will not, and I have a hard time coming up with any scenario in which bitcoin would reach a value of 0. Anything is possible, of course, and if the internet were entirely eliminated, bitcoin would likely eventually reach a value of 0.
No fiat has been successful? The Euro is the most valuable currency in the world (not per note, but overall) and it was introduced in 1996. Bitcoins have existed for only 4 years, but they have not surpassed a single fiat currency in value. If the euro fails (which I don't think it will as it is more popular than any other currency that has ever existed), it will be replaced by another fiat. If bitcoins fail, they will be done.
So basically, I disagree with all of your statements.
I think you are invested for all the wrong reasons, looking at it like a stock to buy and sell, and fail to see the enormous globe-changing potential ramifications of this elegant idea we call bitcoin.
What "globe-changing" ramifications are there? And why are fiat currencies destined to fail, when they have existed for
thousands of years versus bitcoin's four?
Because of the law of supply and demand, when fewer bitcoins are available the ones that are left will be in higher demand, and therefore will have a higher value. So, as Bitcoins are lost, the remaining bitcoins will eventually increase in value to compensate. As the value of a bitcoin increases, the number of bitcoins required to purchase an item decreases. This is a deflationary economic model. As the average transaction size reduces, transactions will probably be denominated in sub-units of a bitcoin such as millibitcoins ("Millies") or microbitcoins ("Mikes").
The Bitcoin protocol uses a base unit of one hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin ("a Satoshi"), but unused bits are available in the protocol fields that could be used to denote even smaller subdivisions.
You tell me not to treat it like a stock, yet you do the same. "when fewer bitcoins are available.. therefore higher value". This implies that not everyone has one- that fiat is not dead (unless the people without bitcoins have no form of currency) and that people are still purchasing bitcoins with fiat, as if they were stock. What value would bitcoins have at this point? 1 BTC may be worth 1 billion dollars some day, but then it's worth
1 billion dollars. Without anything to buy with that bitcoin, it's only value comes from its exchange rate with fiat.