Re:For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins
by thesimpsons1022 on Friday June 13, 2014 @08:54AM
(#7888519)
a lot of these people don't have that good of arguments, so they instead use crappy metaphors to make their points. they take something that is totally different than bitcoin and try to use that to make their point. but they need examine f it is a valid analogy. I don't think a PC, a consumer good, can be compared to something that's supposed to function as a currency. one is a store of a value and one has a functional use. if your grandma wants to save her money she should by stocks or bonds or something with low volatility. if she wants to send an email she should get a computer, not for storing value, but for it's functional
use. and if she wants to get around town she should by a car, even though they depreciate. I don know how op ever thought it made sense to compare bitcoin and computers.
Re:For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins
by sillysaurus3 on Friday June 13, 2014 @01:51PM
(#7890031)
That's a bit harsh. The metaphor made a lot of sense, because their point was that bitcoin is currently hard to use, and will get easier with time, which is true.
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.