Topic: the usage of Bitcoin now - page 2. (Read 2446 times)

some are not buying much with bitcoin, because they are waiting for a better price, thus a better buying power when using bitcoin, and i'm in the same boat as those people

i want to buy more stuff with my precious bitcoin, current price is unfair...

The best use of Bitcoin in my opinion... buying "stuff" online, with more security than traditional payment methods. I would much rather buy my honey and coffee online with Bitcoin, than buying it with a credit card.

Online Tipping for me, has also been growing, and I did not notice this before Bitcoin. {Micro payments}

Let's hope, the remittance market takes off, and Bitcoin vendor's increase, then we would go to the Moon.

Well I don't know about mainstream but personally I've found all the services I need for now. I've got the best store ever for buying used video games - http://www.jjgames.com/ - super cheap + free shipping  and for all my other needs I've got http://www.overstock.com/   And this is only the beginning 

I have to agree. The current exchange options aren't even safe. From what we've seen in the past exchanges tend to get hacked and people lose their money. That's harming the confidence in Bitcoin.
Localbitcoins is quite good and is improving in time. Just look at how many countries you can trade (240)!

So far I've donated some to charity and have gambled a small sum (for fun only). Aside from that I've bought a few things using Bitcoin online. It's quite useful as I didn't want to involve my CC in such transactions.
Moving/sending money with Bitcoin is so much better than using Banks (slow) or companies such as WU (expensive).

Yes if microsoft been attracted to this bitcoin and he start to buying all if this bitcoin and for that time new era is coming, bitcoin must be used of all people around the world

I share some usages what I know

1. Buy and sell, merchant use btc as a payment way.
2. investment or speculation btc, earn fiat money.
3. online gambling, since btc is anonymous, so it becomes the best way to gamble now.
4. charity, people can donate money and don't share their names, ages, it's anonymous.
5. international money trasfer, safer and faster than bank.
6. avoid taxes if you make money from btc.
7. remittance service, faster and cheaper than bank too.
8. money laundry, hackers and scammers use btc to wash dirty money.

Any more, you guys can add more usages to my list.

for Charity donation some ppl want to stay anonymous. Or for presidential campaign. 

From my experience, the exchange infrastructure still needs to be improved before mainstream usage for remittance

Currently I use bitcoin to do all my international transfers to my relatives and purchase in other countries. However, not every country have a good and fast exchange, this makes bitcoin transfer expensive

The best I can do is to set up a purchase order at localbitcoins, a bit less than market price, get coins at some discount, then send it to another country, having another people setting up a sell order at localbitcoins and hopefully he get a better price when selling coins, thus even make some money in the process

However, this require that both of us havíng high trust rating on localbitcoins, otherwise no one is going to take our orders. And if I want to do it fast and with large volume, the only way is to seek a large exchange domestically. Currently there are only a few large exchanges like bitstamp, okcoin, bitfinex, etc... and that limited the transaction in just a few countries

Hopefully in future when volume on localbitcoins are large enough, you can send any amount through it without paying too much fee (localbitcoins take 1% fee) or wait too long, but currently the fee would still be higher than 5% at both end if you take order instead of make your own orders (The other 4% fee can not be eliminated due to order makers must cover bitcoin's high volatility)

Interchangeability between bitcoins and gold/silver is a very important factor. As long as they are tradeable, btc can be viewed as a mean of store-of-wealth. 

This, you cannot stop me from sending money to anyone, no matter their location.  This is freedom of speach.

It's very hard to estimate what all those transactions means. In fact I think it's impossible, it's a mix between trading, speculation, buying of goods and services... all those transactions that get done in person for cash will never have any meaning unless you are part of one of the 2 parties.
As decentralized exchanges start being operative, it will be even harder to track anything.

I ordered I tunes gift card through gyft and I got it in a jiffy, bitcoin is growing in a faster pace than all time, you can also get a discount  on amazon products by ordering through purse.io and brawker, several supermarkets have started to take bitcoin as a payment and have fresh vegetables delivered to you

We don't necessarily need all the illegal stuff to survive. For one, I can imagine the biggest impact that can be seen when this has gone mainstream is by having big auction marketplace like ebay using bitcoin as payment currency. Other areas would be as an official in-game currency in the gaming industry and also for cross border transaction. The amount of cash volume involved would be big.

Lots of tiny dust payments to faucet newbs aren't really significant even if you added them all up collectively. These sorts of payments are likely a waste of time as dust payments cost more to send in fees so it's not worth it half of the time.

You can also store very small amounts of timestamped data in the blockchain, which has all sorts of uses. See Counterparty as an example!

I am really convinced that those are the things that the media likes to publish because they seem interesting and make a good story. It's a safe bet that BTC is used in that way, but it's not unique aspect to BTC. Cash is used in the same kind.

Yes I do see a lot of use for gambling and scammers

I think one of the most prolific uses of Bitcoin today is faucet payments and gambling in small quantities. If you look at the blockchain transactions, you see frequent payment made to sites like SatoshiBones. Take away these transactions daily from the +/- 100 000 transactions and you have very little transactions being done for the rest of the things being done in Bitcoin. ^HeH^

Moving money across boarders is another genuine market right now, whether that be sending to friends/family or if you are travelling yourself and dont want to pay conversion charges to each fiat denomination.

The remittance market is a huge industry that can benefit from bitcoin in my opinion. I also think any businesses that are censored by the gov or Paypal or Visa/Mastercard like Megaupload can benefit massively from bitcoin. It's probably their only option that is free from total censorship and that's a great plus in my opinion.