Satoshi wrote in the genesis block:

    The Times 03/Jan/ 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Bitcoin was released in staunch opposition to the banking system.

> Storing value in an encrypted wallet on your computer is inconvenient to say the least

It's possible to store Bitcoin on sheets of paper, or entirely in your brain, safely and securely.

I get the distinct feeling you've never used Bitcoin before. Please, sign up for an account at Coinbase and buy $1000+ of BTC or otherwise put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to buy a serious amount of coin before making these sorts of statements.

Bitcoin isn't about being a PayPal competitor. It's money outside the State, always has been, always will be. Unless of course it is corrupted from the inside out, probably by whitewashed companies who are too afraid to embrace a great thing in spite of what regulators would like them to do.

>It's possible to store Bitcoin on sheets of paper

The process for making a secure paper wallet is far from convenient and brain wallets are about the worst possible way to store bitcoin and are far from safe and secure. If you're going to get some please do not use a brain wallet.

Numerous wallets make it dead simple to create a paper wallet. With Electrum, you just open the program and it automatically generates 12 words which you can write down on paper or learn by heart. It doesn't get much easier than that, and it's perfectly safe and secure to do.

> It doesn't get much easier than that

I think a lot of people would argue that sticking with their current system (banks, fiat currency, etc) is, in fact, much easier than that.

They are more familiar with the current system, but after you have done it for the first time, you realise that electrum is actually way easier than banks. People just think its harder, but it is not really.

It's only easier if you ignore the part where you have to get bitcoin in the first place.

All the examples of "see Bitcoin isn't hard, here is $0.0005 worth" completely gloss over this point.

That's no fault of Bitcoin, however. Getting USD isn't magically easy either.

Sure it is. You can sit on a street corner and people will literally hand you physical cash. It doesn't get any easier than that.

Someone merely held a Bitcoin address sign on TV and received coins from all over the world: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/1/5163926/one-college-footba... How awesome is that? It sure beats the reach of sitting on a street corner...

Oh? Something tells me I can't write a Bitcoin address on my direct deposit form.

Seriously, the interface provided by Citibank is pretty freaking great. I work, I swipe my credit card places. As long as I do the former more than the latter, I don't need to touch anything else. Also every few months I accumulate enough points to buy something on Amazon for $50-$100 for free.

Bitcoin could be even better if I got paid in Bitcoin and could pay people in Bitcoin, but I can't.

I had to physically go to a bank and talk to people to set up my bank account. I don't see how that can be considered more convenient than spending 5 minutes on a website.

How does spending 5 minutes on a website get you bitcoin without having already gone to a bank and talked to people?

Localbitcoins.com, buy with cash

I don't see how you think that avoids you needing to go see people in person which was the claim of the person I replied to.

Dead simple but no more secure than just storing the file encrypted on your computer.

Electrum is great and if you write down the words thats fine. If you try to memorize them without a backup there are a lot of events that can happen in your life that will lead to the total loss of your coins.

Agreed. I'm looking for a LiveCD style paper-waller generator, do you know of one?

I don't use paper wallets myself but any barebones linux bootcd/usb with https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org and BIP38 selected is the route I see most recommended.

Very convenient!

If you know what you are doing, brain wallets are very safe. However, if you don't, you might easily make a disastrous mistake. The casual user should not store coins in a brainwallet, but they can be quite useful.

If you know what you are doing you can get enough entropy that is true but there is still a lot of things that can happy in your life that will affect your memory but not be life ending. In those cases without a backup you'll lose your coins.

I have bought and sold a few hundreds of USD worth of BTC and even used a few tens of USD of it for transactions, and while you're definitely right about the intent and philosophy of BTC, I agree with your parent comment that what is actually exciting about BTC (or something inspired by it) is its potential as the lowest-friction way to buy things digitally. The sooner BTC shakes its crypto-libertarian culture the better. Right the vast majority of people in the world (at least those who've heard of it) know it as this weird, unsavory, and probably criminal thing, instead of as the backbone of the new cheaper and much more convenient way of buying things and moving money around.

If it can still be used by die-hards like you to protect themselves from the State, all the better, but that part of it is never going to be of much interest to most people.

> the vast majority of people in the world (at least those who've heard of it) know it as this weird, unsavory, and probably criminal thing

Yes, and it's the truth. What can bitcoin do that no other currency can? It can operate entirely outside of the existing banking system. That's the X factor of bitcoin, and NY regulators hate it for this reason.

The black market actually has _very_ wide appeal. It's worth north of 40% of GDP in certain developing nations. It's worth billions of dollars in America, and Bitcoin has that market cornered online. This _is not_ a bad thing. It is something worth celebrating.

I might add, the vast majority of Americans can't imagine a world in which the US Dollar isn't world reserve currency. Bitcoin was devised as a better currency system than the US Dollar ever could be, and that's why it's so special. Bitcoin doesn't try to be legal, it doesn't try to be whitewashed and savory, Bitcoin just _is_. And what it is, is a vastly superior form of money than fiat currency.

We disagree. Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) can be safely transferred across large distances more easily than existing currency. It will be a good thing when governments figure out how to regulate it (and I think they will, eventually).

Except NY already figured that part out. In fact, they recently presented their regulatory framework for public review. It involves shutting down Bitcoin as we know it, and replacing it with something in which

- every single wallet provider, including makers of open source wallets like Bitcoin-QT, in addition to Bitcoin exchanges and banks, are legally considered "Virtual Currency Businesses"

- each customer of a "Virtual Currency Business" must have a verified physical address and government issued photo ID on file in order to use Bitcoin

- each "Virtual Currency Business" must file suspicious activity reports on all transactions valued at over $3000 USD, meaning open source software like Bitcoin-QT must know each of its users at all times

- each "Virtual Currency Business" must retain records for no less than 10 years

- each "Virtual Currency Business" must maintain collateral in the form of USD including collateral for total Bitcoin balances

- each would-be creator of a cryptocurrency must register with the State before releasing 1 SLOC

The reason it's easy to transfer Bitcoin across long distances is that the system works without intermediaries. Regulation, as outlined by NY, involves polluting the Bitcoin protocol with precisely the same intermediaries that make the traditional banking system so awful.

> It will be a good thing when governments figure out how to regulate it

In other words, you believe it's a good idea to castrate Bitcoin and make it no different than PayPal, SWIFT, ACH, etc.

Points taken! That does sound awful. I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want regulations, but "good" ones, where "good" is defined in some vague and totally subjective way.

Ask an Italian whether a black market dominated economy is a good thing.

I believe you are philosophically right about the idea of bitcoin. The cat is out of the bag: there is a distributed alternative to the global banking system. BTC might be corrupted, but the idea is not. Another spin on the POW and on the mass distribution mechanism, and the regulators might have a serious problem on their hands. Lots of ifs.

>Bitcoin was released in staunch opposition to the banking system.

No, i think that quote makes it clear that bitcoin was released in staunch opposition to centralized currency, where some authority (central bank) can issue new units of currency at will and devalue the currency for everyone.

Sorry, but you are wrong on most accounts, especially your evaluation of my person. You cannot possibly argue that using BTC is in some way more convenient than using a credit card. Is it personally and politically better to use BTC? Maybe. Is it easier for an average bear? Absolutely not.

That's the only thing about bitcoin that actually interests me, how easy is to make payments cutting and pasting some text.

But everything else surrounding bitcoin, I don't find it useful at all. I just want/need something like bitcoin, but connected to my €-denominated bank account. I don't want or need an alternative "digital currency" and I find the mere idea of one stupid, I just want to make exchanges with current currencies (which are already "digital", something that for some reason is missed all the time, maybe because it's much easier to get attention on the internet using buzzwords).

Because bitcoin wants to be a currency, and a decentralized one at that, it needs to do the cool, but weird shit that the blockchain is. All the cryptography behind it, i find it a massively complex waste of time that only gets justified because of the absurd fetish of decentralization. The world just needs to safely and easily exchange money through internet, nothing else. An overengineered solution that tries to workaround the current financial system for no good reason is not a great solution for that need IMO.

I'm hoping that at some point someone (banks, credit card companies, paypal) will end up doing what bitcoin doesn't wants to do.

So you want Ripple, essentially.

You should be aware that anything dependent on a small set of entities can fail spectacularly. You never know if they get hacked, bankrupt, sued, raided, etc ...

Ripple is a rip-off. You buy a gift card and the money stays there..

Ripple allows people to issue cryptographically secured debt securities, not sure what you think it is