1. That is due to speculation. 2 & 3. Those are basically due to Bitcoin being so new. Governments don't really know how to deal with it yet. 4. That's true,

1. That is due to speculation. 2 & 3. Those are basically due to Bitcoin being so new. Governments don't really know how to deal with it yet. 4. That's true, though there will likely be a product that will solve that in the future (i.e. a USB key that contains your wallet and signs transactions for you). 5. The waiting for a confirmation is more a limitation of the service. There's no reason why Google IO wouldn't be able to reserve your ticket once it received the transaction (within a couple of seconds) and then give you the ticket once there was a confirmation. 6. You use a cold storage wallet to hold the bulk of your funds, then transfer them to a hot wallet as needed. (So, keep your $5k in BTC in your cold wallet, and transfer $500 to your hot wallet every week or something.) Decrypting a hot wallet shouldn't be much harder than entering a password.