"they are already used to (by partnering with banks and other financial services)"
now I am pretty new to all of this and dont really know what I am talking about. But isnt one of the major things that is great about bitcoin the fact that banks dont have anything to do with it?
now I am pretty new to all of this and dont really know what I am talking about. But isnt one of the major things that is great about bitcoin the fact that banks dont have anything to do with it?
That is one of the great things about Bitcoin. You can be your own bank. This is useful in the same way it would be useful to have a vault under your house to store gold and a Star Trek transporter to send that gold to whomever you wanted to instantly. Very useful.
However, as an everyday way of making payments to other people, not very useful (unless you already have tons of them and your friends and vendors have tons of them). In order to buy a pizza with Bitcoin, I need to find a merchant that accepts Bitcion, and then I need to find a way to get my money to an exchange (at a fee), then buy Bitcoin on that exchange (at a fee). That's a lot of work and expense to buy a pizza. Now I might be ideologically inclined to go through that work, but most people won't be. Most people are going to whip out their debit card and make a payment to the pizza guy with their fiat currency. That simple.
Whatever the legal tender of the land is, is what people will use, unless their is a reason not to (ie - transactions that are illegal with the legal tender, etc.). The only way to get a new currency to move with existing currencies is to make the addition of those currencies TRANSPARENT to the majority of the people involved (not the hard-core people like Bitcoiners). This is what it will take for mass adoption. To avoid this issue is folly.
Wrong way round. With bitcoin you can operate the warehousing function of a bank, but not the more important money creation function. With ripple you can be your own bank by creating IOUs that are backed by something. Whether anyone would want to use it is a different matter. You can *almost* do this in bitcoin, but it's very tricky. Bitcoin and ripple in theory should be complimentary ... in theory ...
