Sub-prime real estate was a scam. Huge companies with massive legal departments protected themselves from the illegal part of the scam - all those loan officers telling people to lie on their loan applications. In fact these banks got their lobbyists to get them TARP bailouts after the scam had run its course.

Banks are willing to trade subprime "liar loans" once legally insulated, so big companies willing to deal with Bitcoin doesn't really mean much.

I didn't say it was impossible to short Bitcoins. They are not FX traded alongside the dollar, euro, yen etc. though.

The central question is, why do Bitcoins have value? Why did subprime real estate loans, pets.com stock and Dutch tulip blubs have value? Actually, both these things were hypothetically more valuable than Bitcoins. Bitcoins are worthless.

When the price of a Bitcoin drops below $100, are people here going to learn a lesson about how value works? I don't think they will. That's the thing - Bitcoin will crash, and those talking it up here won't have learned a thing. If they did, these scams (subprime, pets.com stock, dutch Tulip Bulbs) couldn't keep popping up over time suckering people in. People have no concept of the relation of price to value, and thus are easily fooled.

I mean, at least Prof. Bitcorn gave us a date. An open ended "it's a scam and you people are going to learn...someday" is not very useful.

And speaking of value, after years of paying $30 a pop to receive a few thousand dollars from Europe in 3-5 business days, being able to effortlessly send a few digits, pay a few cents, and receive that money in less than an hour is...highly valuable.

For Bitcoin I need to:

* Get the requisite amount of bitcoins, plus a percentage extra to protect against fluctuations (BTC crashed is not a valid excuse for non-payment of rent)

* Help said friend set up a BTC wallet, plus security

* Find a trustworthy person willing to exchange USD for BTC at some agreed value

* Send friend to person and hope the exchange goes as planned.

I'd love to use BTC in place of IMT but it's just not easy enough yet.

- Investigate which PC she should buy

- Find someone willing to sell a PC at a fair price. This is a problem because PCs get old really quick, and some vendors will try to sell you old PCs at their original prices. I don't know how they expect PCs to be useful if they go down in value so fast. Why buy a PC today, when you can buy it at half its price in a year?

- Ask someone for help to connect all the wires

- Fail to send an email. Learn that she also needs an internet connection

- Investigate which ISP she should hire

- Etc...

With traditional mail, she just writes the letter and drops it in the post office.

When someone tries to use bitcoin and fails, they can lose their home. When silk road 2 lost their users' bitcoins to theft, there was a comment on Reddit about a silk road user who became homeless because they had converted their savings into bitcoin and stored the coins in silk road's webwallet. When the coins were lost, so was their home, since they could no longer afford rent.

Bitcoin needs to become pro-consumer with strong protections and convenience. There are dozens of ways to lose your money, so no one wants to convert a sizable portion of their wealth into bitcoin, which means no one has bitcoin on hand to spend at a whim. Eventually merchants are going to start wondering why they're bothering to let people buy their products via bitcoin since very few people buy anything via bitcoin.

If bitcoin becomes safe and convenient, bitcoin adoption will follow.

That number of Bitcoin users is only increasing with each passing day.

If someone accepts PayPal while insuring against the possibility of not being paid "not accept PayPal"?

If a non-US vendor uses forward/option contracts to maintain cash flow in the local currency, do they "not accept" USD?

People always overestimate the short term consequences and underestimate the long term consequences of such technologies.

Currency is only one way to express the protocol.

I chuckled a little bit when he said hashes people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for... annd those dollars are printed on paper with old dead guys on it. Ahh the world this guy lives in must be an interesting one.

You can commit nearly anonymous transactions over long distances with it. It's value over international currencies is in proportion to the size of the black market transacted via BtC.

There are many people out there who don't try to get rich, they simply mine a handful to buy small amounts of drugs on the internet. The "convenience" of that service raises the utility and value of BtC over e.g. dollars.

Of course, I say nearly b/c a dedicated sleuth could investigate a transaction, but ask yourself as a practical matter, will federales go after an 18-year buying a gram of weed via BtC? of course not. The complexity of the BtC transacation obscures such small transactions well into the realm of "safety."

Fast, nearly anonymous and free long distance transactions are a pretty big deal for non-criminals as well.

Did you ever try transferring a bigger amount of money to a country outside the EU and US? You'd be astonished by the fees and timescales involved.

Services like Western Union and Moneygram are not just used by criminals.

Interest is the keyword here. Banks collect it on their customers' money while they declare it to be 'in-flight'. This is the main reason why transactions that should take seconds are still deliberately delayed for days.

Eh, I think in the long run that will be more of a hindrance than a help, as it will give governments in many places a plausible reason to attempt to ban or limit its use (which would tend to lead to a vicious cycle of only criminals--however you define that--using it).

On a more practical level, I can't remember a time my credit card has been refused for local or international transactions (and any additional fees are largely invisible to me, the consumer). Paying with a credit card also carries certain advantages: If the goods aren't delivered, I spend 2 minutes on the phone and get my money back.

For the vast majority of consumers, the headache of converting local currency to BtC, learning how to use it, and finding a reliable escrow service will greatly outweigh the benefits of being able to buy drugs (especially as states decriminalize drugs). That keeps BtC firmly in the grasp of speculators.

I donated to wikileaks. Except I didn't, because the US put pressure on VISA+MC, and reversed my transaction. That whole business convinced me of the need for decentralised currency.