It worries me to a certain degree that there doesn't appear to be a steady growth of services and stores accepting bitcoins.
So what?
Let's be honest , most people in this thread have no desire of spending their hard earned coins anytime soon. BTC is more like an electronic improved version of gold. And it's not like I can go to a shop with half an ounce of gold in my hand and buy me a smartphone... at least not for the moment. And I don't care... gold is a commonly accepted store of value nevertheless. Enough for me to hold it and change it back into fiat at need.
If anyone quotes this please save me the lecture about BTC having no intrinsic value as opposed to gold. Perception is value.
Valid point, but in my opinion it is a tad naive to just believe that without a bit of skpeticism. I for one want to be more cautious than that. Gold has been used as a store of value and as a currency thousands of years. Today it lost its utility as a currency for the most part, but it's still a rock solid value store because it's so well established and has an undeniable proof of reliability in price storage.
Ancient physical coins were made of valuable metals, gold being the most prominent. To this day, the value of physical coins is, at least by principle, tied to the value of the material they are made of.
Gold might be mostly a value store today, but t has been a very active currency in the past.
Transactions of small amounts are penalized with bitcoins, set a low reward value on your client and it will take forever to get a decent number of confirmations. This wasn't even discussed pre lates bubble, and even today it is somewhat a taboo. So we are left with medium to large value transactions, and to be optimistic we say that bitcoins is more like gold. In other words, we fast forward the utility part of a currency and jump in directly to the value store stage.
I'm skeptical about this. Would I see adoption by average joe, I would be much more sure about bitcoin's success.