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> My intuition says that the storeowner has no reason to accept. Well, of course they don't. Things have just got worse for them. But that's exactly what happe
by phaemon 13y ago
> My intuition says that the storeowner has no reason to accept.
Well, of course they don't. Things have just got worse for them. But that's exactly what happened to many local retailers when their customers realised they could get stuff cheaper by ordering over the Internet than they could buying locally. It's just how things go.
> However, I do not believe Bitcoin is a stock, so I'm not sure what it is.
It's an infrastructure. It happens to have a currency built in on top of it, but at heart it's an infrastructure. Its worth depends entirely on what people do with it, like the Internet itself.
So, it's a little meta to consider what a currency that's an infrastructure is worth in it's own terms, but no-one has to decide that....just let people pay what they want for their share.
- fat0wl 13y agoeh you lost me, man. he still has the option to only take USD or use a 3rd party payment processor. At the moment, it seems that this approach is not costing any businesses in sales, since Bitcoin is still used infrequently as currency. The only point it actually becomes a currency itself is when the shop owner stops using a 3rd party processor and says "you know what? I'm comfortable just holding onto these". With the market volatility of Bitcoin this is unlikely to happen for a while, unless they are among the believers who think the value can increase indefinitely and accurately represented by trading prices. I definitely understand the value as an infrastructure, but this is the web. Better solutions will emerge and could just co-opt the Bitcoin infrastructure. Like the way ISPs came in and bought access to the data lines of phone companies, same idea.
- phaemon 13y ago> eh you lost me, man. he still has the option to only take USD or use a 3rd party payment processor. Uh, no he doesn't. He only takes Units. We're talking about your hypothetical melon salesman, remember? > Better solutions will emerge and could just co-opt the Bitcoin infrastructure. Probably. I would certainly hope so! That doesn't stop Bitcoin being valuable right now and new solutions being more valuable in the future. There's no reason not to have several competing digital currencies on the go.