Citibank is, well, a bank. Coinbase is a currency exchange, and more analogous to those Forex booths you see in airports.

There are Bitcoin banks, but putting your Bitcoin into a bank loses the decentralization benefits. Admittedly holding onto your own BTC requires more security than many people are capable of implementing, but better and better solutions are being created to solve this problem.

See also: taxis

People do enjoy complaining but I quite like being able to fly cheap without paying for stuff I don't need. Admittedly it was more appalling when you couldn't even pay for your ticket without paying a fee (unless you had one particular laser card) but the most onerous ones have been phased out.

The customer interface is (was? I don't know if taxi companies competes on the app side) way above and that's the value here. Better information and information model, almost no idle time.

Uber came in and was very clearly illegal here, but they offered significantly better service and had more drivers available. A couple years on after fighting the government for a long time, Uber finally came to an agreement with the government and new regulation was passed. Rides sharing vehicles will now require nearly all the same regulations as a taxi, but the larger affect is more competition to traditional all taxis.

one other thing - with regards to fiat, BTC does have one theoretical advantage - the ability to limit government spending because it cannot be created out of thin air to be created as credit and spent as debt. and that is why no government will ever use it. but we wouldn't want this anyway because we actually DO want government to be able to create money as needed. the reason is that because the stated goal of the fed is "stable prices and full employment" stable prices are simple - your monetary supply expands AND CONTRACTS with GDP, pure and simple. 100 bushels of wheat in your economy and $200 in money? that's $2 per bushel. if your economy doubles due to additional population or technological/productivity improvements and starts producing 150 bushels, you need to have $300 in your economy for stable prices. the issue is that our government increases its spending at a rate that far exceeds the growth of GDP.

want a great idea for a far superior monetary system? read this: https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=209282

This is historically and factually inaccurate. Currencies typically originated as highly marketable commodities that are naturally scarce and fungible - salt, gold, silver, cigarettes in jail, etc.

One could argue that's the definition of real money - but to say Bitcoin isn't real money is to move the goal post when what you mean is Bitcoin isn't a traditional fiat currency. There's no debate there.

Bitcoin has the advantage over fiat of having been designed with incentives of participants aligned so as to make the likelyhood of inflation extremely small over the long term. So the scenario that Bitcoin makes better is the one in which money printing would have occurred, but now can't because of recourse to Bitcoin.

It's a big world out there, most of which has no easy way of integrating with modern systems of credit, lending and other financial instruments. I see blockchain technology as a promising way for distributed groups to organize, create operating agreements, and execute contracts for market rate on a global setting.

Erm... BTC is less stable than USD by every conceivable measure.

http://www.orchardplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/bt...

Tell me: would you be surprised if BTC changed in price by 50% by the end of this month? I wouldn't be, I simply don't trust BTC to retain its value in any way. BTC goes up or down, and that's bad for "currencies"

Bitcoin being a globally distributed ledger has the ability to represent shares of commodities and equities. It's why Delaware is considering incorporating blockchain tech.

You could imagine merchants pricing in shares of Apple - and customers paying in shares of oil and Google - to be settled at PoS. Check out shapeshift.io to see how fluid crypto-to-crypto trades can be.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/delaware-considers-using-blockch...

This is not the case for BTC or AAPL. If I get 1BTC today, some new MtGox story might wreck its value before I buy groceries with it tomorrow. AAPL is unlikely to move as much, but it moves around by several percent on a fairly regular basis, and some huge negative news could send it plunging.

I could imagine your scenario of pricing in AAPL and paying in oil and GOOG in a technological sense, but I have a hard time imagining anyone actually doing it.

In Kenya people trade in cell phone minutes (MPESA). It's not a huge stretch to imagine trading in units of energy or other commodities.

It seems to me that having an instant settlement layer challenges the need for currency as an intermediary.

1 cell phone minute today is 1 cell phone minute tomorrow - it's a real thing with real utility. Not so with BTC.

Now the kicker is, the bitcoin transaction fee is increasing rapidly due to (self-induced, political and totally fixable) bottlenecks in the network. I foresee an alternative taking over bitcoin if this isn't resolved soon.

So when you want to buy cell phone minutes, you simply convert your oil certificate to cell minute certificates through a settlement layer. This means merchants can denominate prices in whatever they'd like - and buyers can pay in whatever currency/asset they'd like.

But then fails to be better or even different to what we have now:

This means merchants can denominate prices in whatever they'd like - and buyers can pay in whatever currency/asset they'd like.

Indeed! We have that now. Where I live we use the Australian Dollar because that's what buyers and pays like. When I want to convert stock to cell phone minutes I do that through a settlement layer: log on to stock trading platform, sell shares, wait two days, buy cell phone minutes - it's sufficiently instant for my needs, and appears to be meeting everyone else's needs as evidenced by the continual churn of economic activity.

One issue I see with your proposal is I'm not convinced I know how to rationally price an oil certificate vis-à-vis a cell phone minute. That's why we need markets, I guess.

Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. The problem of converting stock certificates to cell phone minutes is largely solved for most people who own stock. The problem of purchasing cell phone minutes is largely solved, and for those places where it isn't slapping a blockchain on it won't help any more than slapping whatever database is popular this week on it.

It doesn't matter if I hold a bitcoin or an oil certificate or a share of AAPL or a futures contract for polar bear fur, I don't want to use stuff as currency where I don't know how much groceries it'll buy next week.

There's places in this world where the idea of an apolitical central bank is unimaginable. If you don't have an imagination I can't help you there. Or maybe you don't car about humans from non-western countries. Either way, this innovation clearly isn't for you.

What? Do you change all of your savings into stocks or bonds each month?

Currency is the best short-term store of value. And "short term" means anything I plan to use in the next 6 months (My emergency fund will last 6 months without me being forced to touch my bonds or stocks, giving me breathing room for when to liquidate my long-term savings.)

I trust cash to be stable in the short term, even if it loses value long-term. I can't trust BTC as either long-term or even short-term storage.

BTC utterly fails at "6-month" storage due to its volatility. BTC has no history for growing (stocks are based on company profits. So as long as companies are profitable, they'll grow). Bonds are strong guarantees for growing: only bankruptcy can prevent me from getting me money promised through a bond.

What guarantees do I have for long-term BTC storage? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Short term? Well, again, stability is more important than gains in the short term (which is why my short-term is cash... not stocks).

Work costs money: like electricity isn't free at the scale of the BTC Network. It costs thousands of dollars of electricity to run those BTC mining rigs to verify the ledger.

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If you're saying the future of "blockchains" is just a cryptographically signed ledger, without any proof of work or BTCs being assigned, I think I can agree with you on that.

But at the moment, "blockchain" is the new cloud. No one really knows what a "blockchain" is anymore, aside from a new electronic ledger of some kind. BTC is clearly a blockchain, but a lot of the "blockchain-based technologies" are nothing like BTC at all.

A lot of these "blockchains" are just centralized banks electronically verifying transactions. Like a notarized bill of sale, except the 'notarized' portion is electronic. Proof of work and all that stuff just don't exist in a lot of the "blockchain" solutions coming out.