We need a MAJOR Porn distributor (Vivid, etc) to start accepting bitcoins. That will do the trick.
Lol, most likely indeed... Come get sum! 
Topic: What are the major hurdles you feel BitCoin faces to mainstream acceptance? (Read 2772 times)
October 03, 2011, 02:50:09 PM
October 03, 2011, 01:31:56 PM
We need a MAJOR Porn distributor (Vivid, etc) to start accepting bitcoins. That will do the trick.
I am not even joking. What we need right now is to bring on the "bad guys" onto the damn scene as the price of $5 is killing me !!!
October 03, 2011, 01:30:07 PM
We need a MAJOR Porn distributor (Vivid, etc) to start accepting bitcoins. That will do the trick.
October 02, 2011, 07:58:30 PM
They can insure the funds, because they can print more money to pay it back anytime.
You do realize that the banks of the US pay the FDIC insurance premiums on their deposits so that their depositors can have insurance, and insurance payouts come from that pool, right? Yes, the US could potentially inflate the dollar to worthlessness, but that's now how deposit insurance works at all. 
October 02, 2011, 04:36:07 PM
Yeah, I actually come from a far more leftist point of view than what seems like most bitcoin users. As a socialist/communist I think bitcoin is perfect for really allowing everyone to understand how wealth is distrubuted and how inequality manifests itself.
You can't actually achieve equal wealth distribution when new phony wealth is being created out of thin air.
You can't actually achieve equal wealth distribution when new phony wealth is being created out of thin air.
October 02, 2011, 03:53:43 PM
Many people use cash for day-to-day transactions, but the majority of USD and other currencies is stored by financial institutions that provide protection and insurance of one's funds. If Bitcoin were to have such protection and insurance, its utility would greatly rise.
They can insure the funds, because they can print more money to pay it back anytime. The problem is that when the print more money, it's only taking the value from existing money in circulation rather than creating out of thin air like you would want to believe. It's only redistributing wealth that people already had which was stored in pre existing money in circulation. Bitcoin you don't need the insurance of people's wealth paying back the money because the value already comes from the trust among the people who use bitcoin. If you want to keep it safe, then you simply need to back up the file properly instead of trusting another person or corporation to hold you money and loan it to others at interest.
October 02, 2011, 03:46:21 PM
Many people use cash for day-to-day transactions, but the majority of USD and other currencies is stored by financial institutions that provide protection and insurance of one's funds. If Bitcoin were to have such protection and insurance, its utility would greatly rise.
October 02, 2011, 03:29:30 PM
So, to summarize:
Fundamental hurdle for Bitcoin:
That people perceive it as a way to get rich on the expense of others.
Fundamental hurdle for Bitcoin:
That people perceive it as a way to get rich on the expense of others.
+1
October 02, 2011, 03:12:47 PM
People say that nobody will adopt such a coin because it cannot promise to make them rich. I say, the promise of making you rich is exactly why bitcoin took off with early adopters AND is exactly what holds it back from more mainstream types. We have to let go of getting rich off the currency. That's the whole problem with govt-backed currencies anyway -- some minority gets rich off the currency at the expense of everyone else. Bitcoin is no better in this regard, but we CAN do better.
Thank you for pointing this out.
Currently, I see too many people around that just try to get rich quick with Bitcoin.
As a fellow libertarian and Austrian economics fan, I can just say:
The advantage of using Bitcoin should not be getting rich on the expenses of others.
There is nothing wrong with getting rich, just take care that you respect your fellows on this planet.
The idea of getting rich off a currency is wrong and is exactly what lead to bank-controlled economies on this planet with enormous misplacement of human energy in all economic fields.
Instead, the advantage of using Bitcoin is to save money and effort by not enriching people which control the currency.
And Bitcoin is the only currency (apart from gold) that can not be controlled.
So, to summarize:
Fundamental hurdle for Bitcoin:
That people perceive it as a way to get rich on the expense of others.
October 02, 2011, 01:37:05 PM
Part of the problem with a currency that is suspected to gain value is that people are less willing to spend it. I think people would be more willing to accept it as a currency if it made some attempt to maintain a constant value instead of an increasing value.
Yeah, that's actually a major issue IMO, and the worst part of that problem is: it seems that a lot of people very involved in BTC think that this on the contrary is a strength. This can even be read it the FAQ (not with those words, but that seems to be the idea): "don't worry, there won't be inflation but rather deflation, it's a great thing". No, it's not. If BTCs keep gaining value, clinging to your BTCs instead of spending them is actually a profitable investment. Since I don't think anyone will put all their money or even the majority of their money into BTC, noone will be forced to spend them, ie it's possible that everyone just cling to their BTCs. How useful is a currency if noone is willing to spend it? Real world money keeps losing 1-2% value every year, and when you think about it, that's definitely a strong incentive to either spend it or invest it, and not to keep it dormant in your safe like you'd do with, say... gold? Which leaves to my next question: are you guys willing to create another currency or to create another gold?If you're willing to create another gold, then there's a problem: real gold actually has an intrinsic value, ie it is required to build some electronics components, and lots of
want jewelry made of gold. The same is not true of BTCs. BTCs serve no component-building purpose nor decorative purpose. If all the BTCs of the world end up in a forgotten stash on a forgotten hard drive, noone will miss it. At best maybe someone will create another BTC-like e-currency.I'm actually mining at the moment, but have no plan of selling or spending my BTCs any time soon...
Increasing value is a problem, but I can't think of any good way to solve it. They need to be percieved as limited in number because they have no value otherwise. Miners don't need both an increasing difficulty and decreasing value of thier product over time. I'm planning on selling games for SC/BTC, but i suspect I'll have to sell them for less than they're worth in those currencies because customers will factor in the currencies potential when deciding to exchange for goods. Still, I love the idea of cryptocurrency, so I'm going to give it a shot.
I believe this is the biggest issue with bitcoin's acceptance right now. There's a catch-22 in which, as the currency gains in acceptance, it also goes way up in value. As it goes way up in value, it is perceived (rightly so) as unstable, making it less attractive to being accepted in the first place.
Sure, we have merchants out there accepting bitcoins for payment, but almost nobody is *pricing* in bitcoins. That's because it's so obvious to everyone that the value of bitcoins is a big question mark. You would have to be pretty bold to price your goods on your store in bitcoins and then go to bed, when overnight the value could fall 50% and somebody could buy out your entire store at half price.
I suspect we could do better, but we are going to have to let go of the "fixed-number-of-coins" love affair that we currently have going on. I'm just as much of a libertarian-leaning gold-standard Austrian nut as the next bitcoin guy, but I think in this case we need to see past the fixed-number-of-coins limitation. Slowly people are starting to catch on. Over in the Alternate Cryptocurrencies forum there's a proposal for "EnCoin" -- somebody's idea of how to design a coin which targets a number of KWH worth of electricity as it's value. That proposal may or may not work, it's got a lot of details to hash out.
We could also have a coin that targets a number of ghash as it's value, by simply having the number of coins per block be proportional to the difficulty of the block and never capping the number of coins. We may also need to have transaction fees that are destroyed or something similar to keep some upward pricing pressure; I haven't worked out all the details, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why this or something like it wouldn't work.
People say that nobody will adopt such a coin because it cannot promise to make them rich. I say, the promise of making you rich is exactly why bitcoin took off with early adopters AND is exactly what holds it back from more mainstream types. We have to let go of getting rich off the currency. That's the whole problem with govt-backed currencies anyway -- some minority gets rich off the currency at the expense of everyone else. Bitcoin is no better in this regard, but we CAN do better.
October 02, 2011, 12:53:00 PM
Once it is integrated into a credit card type form then eveyrone could use it.
Exactly, there aren't any major technical roadblocks. Once the ease of use is there and the reputation for security is established the many other advantages of bitcoin over other forms of currency will shine through with time.
October 02, 2011, 10:12:32 AM
Once it is integrated into a credit card type form then eveyrone could use it.
October 02, 2011, 01:35:11 AM
It's really just a matter of time.
Mainstream acceptance is not "just a matter of time". I think freemoney458 raised lots of valid points, most notably the lack of simplicity. At the moment, I see no reason for the average user to choose BTC over, say PayPal. Getting BTCs is a hassle-full process, where every middleman takes their small percentage. In the end doing a transaction in BTC costs more both in term of money and time. Only miners, gamblers/daytraders and drug dealers can find the system interesting ATM... 
October 01, 2011, 07:17:28 PM
What are the major hurdles you feel BitCoin faces to mainstream acceptance?
easy: 1/3 who use bitcoins getting ripped off.
easy: 1/3 who use bitcoins getting ripped off.
October 01, 2011, 05:13:52 PM
It's really just a matter of time. There has been a lot of good publicity around bitcoin, but that was followed with a lot of not so good stuff. Awareness is the #1 hurdle, now longevity has to be the goal. The system just makes too much sense not to be adopted sometime, but it has to be battle tested over a longer period of time.
October 01, 2011, 04:34:20 PM
I will just answer the question "what are the major hurdles for acceptance by me?", because I can not speak for the mainstream.
For each hurdle I will also give my proposals how to overcome the current problems.
I hope that these ideas will lead to better adoption of BTC by the mainstream.
1st hurdle: Security.
Nobody wants to loose his money.
a) Online wallets and exchanges which store users wallets need to install security measures like currently only banks have, in particular: Strong access protection, redundant data storage, physical protection of servers against all sorts of attacks and other hazards.
b) Wallet encryption finally has arrived with the new BTC client. However other clients (e.g. multibit) have to follow and also implement wallet encryption.
c) Still open is the question how to prevent loss of coins and secure storage of the keys in a redundant manner. BTC clients should better support this, see also my proposal e).
d) Also the problem of providing an untampered, secure system to run the BTC client on should be handled such that it is easier to use. I recommend that together with the BT client one can get a complete live CD distribution of a secure environment like e.g. linuxcoin or ct bankix. However, these distributions should be very easy to install even for non-techies.
Of course the best way would be that the BTC client is programmed so nifty that it can even run in unsecure, hostile environments (keyloggers, trojans etc.) and all attacks are deflected or at least lead to security alerts (think of electronic banking with SMS TAN verification). However it seems that today this is a technology not yet within reach.
2nd hurdle: Money should also be __simple__ and low-tech.
Take a look at history. Money has always been something simple, something you could touch (with the exception of today's fiat currencies and electronic bank accounts).
e) All BTC clients should support importing and exporting of wallet keys and addresses in a __standardized__ way, preferably as paperkeys. This allows users to conveniently store their money without depending on a specific BTC client (version), a specific operating system, a specific wallet encryption / storage method, a specific file system, a specific physical storage device. Also it allows users to exchange bitcoins like normal cash, just exchanging pieces of paper, no need for highly sophisticated electronic devices.
To me, money also should offer the possibility to be __simple__.
3rd hurdle: Ease-of-use of the BTC clients.
Transferring money should have a similar look-and-feel like a standard electronic banking GUI or credit card payment. This includes to optionally get rid of the BTC currency (at least in the GUI) if the user so wishes.
In the end, consumers should be able to look at the BTC client like at the GUI of any other electronic banking. So a consumer finally can choose to use the BTC client because he trusts the service of the "BTC crowd banking" more than the service of the established banks.
Ironically this can lead to a situation where a consumer forgets that he is using BTC as a backbone.
f) BTC clients should offer the possibility to display the balance in any currency the user likes.
g) BTC clients should offer the possibility to choose the currency for a money transfer in any currency that the user chooses for the specific transfer.
h) BTC clients should display the transaction history with the specific currencies that the user selected for the specific money transfer.
i) BTC clients should have an interface to a crowd-based currency exchange mechanism like e.g. ripple. This way the user is not forced to get into the details of currency exchange. This is like using credit card payments in a foreign country: You do not bother about the details, you should pay in the currency you are requested to and the rest is done by the payment system itself. Of course one can think to incorporate online exchanges etc, but personally I prefer to as much keep the concept of distributed crowd services, because it minimizes possible attack vectors against single weak points (and online exchanges have abundantly prooved to be single weak points, even without mentioning past centralized systems like e-gold which were shut down by the governments)
4th hurdle: Instantaneous payment when dealing face-to-face.
j) BTC clients should integrate mechanisms like e.g. vouchersafe or OpenTransactions to make instantaneous payment possible.
For each hurdle I will also give my proposals how to overcome the current problems.
I hope that these ideas will lead to better adoption of BTC by the mainstream.
1st hurdle: Security.
Nobody wants to loose his money.
a) Online wallets and exchanges which store users wallets need to install security measures like currently only banks have, in particular: Strong access protection, redundant data storage, physical protection of servers against all sorts of attacks and other hazards.
b) Wallet encryption finally has arrived with the new BTC client. However other clients (e.g. multibit) have to follow and also implement wallet encryption.
c) Still open is the question how to prevent loss of coins and secure storage of the keys in a redundant manner. BTC clients should better support this, see also my proposal e).
d) Also the problem of providing an untampered, secure system to run the BTC client on should be handled such that it is easier to use. I recommend that together with the BT client one can get a complete live CD distribution of a secure environment like e.g. linuxcoin or ct bankix. However, these distributions should be very easy to install even for non-techies.
Of course the best way would be that the BTC client is programmed so nifty that it can even run in unsecure, hostile environments (keyloggers, trojans etc.) and all attacks are deflected or at least lead to security alerts (think of electronic banking with SMS TAN verification). However it seems that today this is a technology not yet within reach.
2nd hurdle: Money should also be __simple__ and low-tech.
Take a look at history. Money has always been something simple, something you could touch (with the exception of today's fiat currencies and electronic bank accounts).
e) All BTC clients should support importing and exporting of wallet keys and addresses in a __standardized__ way, preferably as paperkeys. This allows users to conveniently store their money without depending on a specific BTC client (version), a specific operating system, a specific wallet encryption / storage method, a specific file system, a specific physical storage device. Also it allows users to exchange bitcoins like normal cash, just exchanging pieces of paper, no need for highly sophisticated electronic devices.
To me, money also should offer the possibility to be __simple__.
3rd hurdle: Ease-of-use of the BTC clients.
Transferring money should have a similar look-and-feel like a standard electronic banking GUI or credit card payment. This includes to optionally get rid of the BTC currency (at least in the GUI) if the user so wishes.
In the end, consumers should be able to look at the BTC client like at the GUI of any other electronic banking. So a consumer finally can choose to use the BTC client because he trusts the service of the "BTC crowd banking" more than the service of the established banks.
Ironically this can lead to a situation where a consumer forgets that he is using BTC as a backbone.
f) BTC clients should offer the possibility to display the balance in any currency the user likes.
g) BTC clients should offer the possibility to choose the currency for a money transfer in any currency that the user chooses for the specific transfer.
h) BTC clients should display the transaction history with the specific currencies that the user selected for the specific money transfer.
i) BTC clients should have an interface to a crowd-based currency exchange mechanism like e.g. ripple. This way the user is not forced to get into the details of currency exchange. This is like using credit card payments in a foreign country: You do not bother about the details, you should pay in the currency you are requested to and the rest is done by the payment system itself. Of course one can think to incorporate online exchanges etc, but personally I prefer to as much keep the concept of distributed crowd services, because it minimizes possible attack vectors against single weak points (and online exchanges have abundantly prooved to be single weak points, even without mentioning past centralized systems like e-gold which were shut down by the governments)
4th hurdle: Instantaneous payment when dealing face-to-face.
j) BTC clients should integrate mechanisms like e.g. vouchersafe or OpenTransactions to make instantaneous payment possible.
September 30, 2011, 07:06:03 AM
lol at the last post, but really. i have bitcoins yet i cant spend them. im unable to contact the person on the forum who i want to send money. should we not have a market place that anyone can use if they have the coin?
August 30, 2011, 09:58:09 PM
Bitcoin© should cooperate with the police in order to capture and punish those who exploit Bitcoin©.
August 30, 2011, 09:56:04 PM
Need to get Walmart to accept btc and resell the ones they get. They could accept then online for purchases and giftcards (so you wouldn't have to wait for confirmations for your purchases in store)
So the hurdle to mainstream acceptance...is mainstream (Walmart) acceptance.....
August 30, 2011, 08:54:42 PM
Mainstream will accept BTC once it is more stable. Maybe their should be different types of BTC?
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