Topic: What is really going to happen with regulation... (Read 724 times)

20 cents =  approximately 200,000 satoshis at the moment. I thought micropayments were one of Bitcoin's strengths.
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Coffee worth 20 cents? Where do you live? Here in Toronto it's hard to find a coffee for under a buck. 

That figure does not reflect their actual worth as those people probably farm the land and live in houses they built themselves - thus most of their economic activity is not measured in money.

Even so with that money you can still save up for a Bitcoin card or as a small business a solar panel and an old android phone. If this gives you access to the entire world financially they may well deem it worthy.

Some very successful businesses already micro finance Indians so they can get a small lamp and a solar panel to use for studying or selling hot dogs at night.

Not with only 11 mil coins so far. When we have 15 mil coins BTC will be mainstream.

I have made predictions before and been rather spot on. The recent bubble I predicted months before it happened as well as the crash. I even made 1 BTC betting about it with one guy.

This is a pretty big picture one so maybe things will go a few years slower or faster but I will be right in the end - mankind has never found a new superior technology and NOT used it.

Even if Bitcoin itself is somehow broken, the users will just download a patch, roll back the blockchain a day or two and the price will climb back up after a year - I know this because it already happened 2010 where they found a SERIOUS bug.

No it is not.. but it will be.

The protocol allows for it, its just a question of when we have nodes working together to store and validate rather than doing it all by themselves. When that is programmed (and it WILL be by SOMEONE when Bitcoin goes to a 100 billion market cap in some years).

BTW:
http://torrent-clients.findthebest.com/q/45/2067/How-many-people-use-Torrent-uTorrent-torrent-client

Mostly illegal, completely open to tracking in most cases (more so than Bitcoin), still used by everyone. Bitcoin will be the same and with just that market share the price would be at least 10 times higher than now.

A coffee is worth 20 cents. Bitcoin is not really designed to handle such small transaction.

if you are paying for a coffee, 0 confirmation transaction is good as the secure one.

He could have said that "Bitcoin will never be used and accepted by normal people and businesses".
No matter if it's legal or illegal, more than 25 % of the world population are living with less than 2 usd a day. They will never get close to bitcoin.
And even in developped and rich countries, if you speak with people you will understand that every "normal" people is not willing to use bitcoins.
Some merchants try to implement it (but actually they only say that they accept bitcoins, but they instantly convert them to USD, and only get paid with USD).

Basically, bitcoin will be used for buying illegal stuff (drugs, and so on), for money laundering, or in a small part, for geeks or utopist people that are totally stupid. Not to mention the greedy people (like me?) only interested in making money (usd/eur) out of it.




Do you realize that it means around 50 usd / bitcoin?





The whole concept of bitcoins is flawed. When you make a transaction, you need an instant confirmation. For instance, if you pay something with your credit card, you want to be sure that the required amount was paid. And you can't wait a few min / hours / days. Bitcoins confirmation (and not transaction) are way too long.

Bitcoins fees are also way too high. I don't pay a single cent for having and using my credit card. I don't give a shit if sellers have to pay xx % to an American company to accept that kind of payment, as long as I got my credit card free of charge, and it's the same price if I pay with my credit card or cash ... Bitcoins fees are totally crazy if you want to send small amounts of money. But anyway, any fee > 0 seems overpriced to me considering the fact that my credit card has a lower fee.

Not reversible transactions + anonymous => you can be stolen anytime and can't do shit to recover your loss.




Bitcoin might have some advantages and could be used in some areas / websites or for very specific matters, but it will never be used a lot in the world, and not like you said.

People say, including one of my close friends, that Bitcoin will never be used and accepted by normal people and businesses if it is illegal.

Well that might be true enough, but consider this: What would the value of Bitcoin be if it was used "only" by everyone sick of the current system in the world? If it was "only" used by small to medium sized pioneering businesses in the world?

I think more than 1 billion $ market cap would be a safe bet.


This is when you must realize that all this regulation stuff is going to fall flat on its face. Sure price will dip in coming months, maybe like in 2011 down to around 30$ (twice the pre-run-up value as in 2011 where it was 1->2$ ignoring the bubble in between). Maybe some people will even become very pessimistic about Bitcoin as after 2011.

But then (~1. Jan 2014) something is going to happen:
1. People will realize how easy it is to exchange Bitcoins. We will have more sellers on sites like localbitcoins and new smaller exchanges.
2. If need be, how easy it is to hide - send to a few addresses and even without coin-mixing a long trial would be necessary to link you to all those transactions - on larger scale making regulation unenforceable.
3. That regulation is not doom - big players will do it, normal people will ignore it and some areas or countries will have none.

(Think about it; today it actually works when a company says "Golly gee all my profit was on the Cayman isles, no tax for you!" a near childish lie - what chance do they have with Bitcoin?)


After this stage (~1. Jan 2015), with the new BTC products and software also out by then making things easy, Bitcoin will reach mainstream at least one or two places in the world (new bubble anyway) (some would say it already has in Kreutzberg and Argentina).

In ~2017 Bitcoin will be boring and simply another money we use (though not the only one) - even a small country jumping on the wagon will not be enough to see those x10 price spikes any more.