The real practical application for bitcoin that I see will be machine to machine transactions, not human to human transactions. Pre-bitcoin if you want to set

The real practical application for bitcoin that I see will be machine to machine transactions, not human to human transactions. Pre-bitcoin if you want to set up a static website that accepts donations to keep on serving it's content you absolutely have to have a human in the loop to faciliate those transactions. If your webserver is overloaded and you need to charge browsers 0.0001 cents per connection to filter out the legitimate browsers there is a clear path to do that with bitcoin, not so with any other payment scheme. The path to do that involves everyone loading bitcoin into the browser and doing some sort of side chain, trust channel, trusted third party to enable such a cheap transaction, but the point being that there is no one stopping people from developing and pushing these technologies with bitcoin. If you wanted to do this with paypal or cash or credit cards or any other known payment system there are very real road blocks and people that can simply pull the plug. Bitcoin enables people to try out new ways of paying without asking anyone's permission. The quickest to market is illegal trades, because there is no one to say no and no one to pull the plug. It is really fairly similar to bittorrent in that way. Everyone will first say the technology should die because it lets people do things illegally.