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Well Bitcoin was a huge failure in that regard. What it needed was inflation that scaled (to prevent hoarding), and ultimately, a way to obfuscate tracking. Ima

Well Bitcoin was a huge failure in that regard. What it needed was inflation that scaled (to prevent hoarding), and ultimately, a way to obfuscate tracking. Imagine thinking knowing your dollar spend will be logged for all eternity is a more 'decentralized' alternative. But as with many idealists, Satoshi and his crypto friends probably didn't think too hard about the problems outside their expertise.

simias 6y ago
Inflation is the catch 22 though. With a limited supply it seems like bitcoin may never successfully become a currency due to deflation, but at the same time without the carrot of massive gains you probably wouldn't have had any adoption at all. Most people owning bitcoin these days do it as a speculative investment, hoping that it'll be worth (a lot) more one day. It's not for nothing that the rallying cry of cryptocurrency zealots everywhere is "HOLD". I think the root of the issue is that bitcoin was created in a vacuum. Some guy didn't start minting euro bills in his basement until France and Germany though "hey, we could use that". The financial systems already existed, and they created the currency to unify pre-existing European currencies. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't have this institutional momentum so they need to reward its users to drive adoption, which is self-defeating in the long run because when I spend a 20 euro bill I don't think "uh, maybe I should just keep it for now, it'll be worth more tomorrow". Actually if anything I think the opposite due to inflation.
- swiley 6y ago
  There are some services that are just easier to use crypto currency to pay for because the maintainers don't want to deal with payment providers. The paid version of cheogram is a good example. This really was the original idea behind bitcoin: dynamically selecting payment providers every ten minutes so they become a commodity.
  - simias 6y ago
    Bitcoin is pretty nice for vendors: no need to integrate with third party services with complicated terms and regulations, no chargeback etc... But from the client's perspective it's pretty crappy for basically the same reasons. In general if you want to impose a new payment system it's really the buying side that needs convincing. If tomorrow a significant portion of the population wants to buy good and services preferably with Bitcoins, that would drive adoption massively. Thing is, from a user experience standpoint cash and Visa and still vastly more convenient, so the vast amount of buyers won't want to bother with cryptocurrency at the moment.
    - swiley 6y ago
      >cash and visa These just don't work well over the internet. Certainly not as well as bitcoin. In person you're right though.

simias 6y ago

Inflation is the catch 22 though. With a limited supply it seems like bitcoin may never successfully become a currency due to deflation, but at the same time without the carrot of massive gains you probably wouldn't have had any adoption at all. Most people owning bitcoin these days do it as a speculative investment, hoping that it'll be worth (a lot) more one day. It's not for nothing that the rallying cry of cryptocurrency zealots everywhere is "HOLD". I think the root of the issue is that bitcoin was created in a vacuum. Some guy didn't start minting euro bills in his basement until France and Germany though "hey, we could use that". The financial systems already existed, and they created the currency to unify pre-existing European currencies. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't have this institutional momentum so they need to reward its users to drive adoption, which is self-defeating in the long run because when I spend a 20 euro bill I don't think "uh, maybe I should just keep it for now, it'll be worth more tomorrow". Actually if anything I think the opposite due to inflation.

swiley 6y ago
There are some services that are just easier to use crypto currency to pay for because the maintainers don't want to deal with payment providers. The paid version of cheogram is a good example. This really was the original idea behind bitcoin: dynamically selecting payment providers every ten minutes so they become a commodity.
- simias 6y ago
  Bitcoin is pretty nice for vendors: no need to integrate with third party services with complicated terms and regulations, no chargeback etc... But from the client's perspective it's pretty crappy for basically the same reasons. In general if you want to impose a new payment system it's really the buying side that needs convincing. If tomorrow a significant portion of the population wants to buy good and services preferably with Bitcoins, that would drive adoption massively. Thing is, from a user experience standpoint cash and Visa and still vastly more convenient, so the vast amount of buyers won't want to bother with cryptocurrency at the moment.
  - swiley 6y ago
    >cash and visa These just don't work well over the internet. Certainly not as well as bitcoin. In person you're right though.