(a) the price was so variable that there was no way to know how much I was actually going to pay for anything;
(b) turning real money to Bitcoin and back again was an utterly horrible experience (and expensive);
(c) total lack of any recourse against fraud or theft, plus a rather scary security track record.
Have these got any better recently?
b) Coinbase a YC company and Circle mentioned already are doing great job on this end
c) Since bitcoin is basically digital equivalent of cash thats like asking for wings on a car. As for security I have a hardware Trezor wallet on my desk which keeps keys secure even if my computer is infected.
You see problems, I see opportunities for startups
The early internet had many problems, those companies that solved these problems are now household names.
Anyways it is sad being down-voted in technical forum by people who should better than most understand that bitcoin despite its faults is still a damned good online payment method especially when compared to existing alternatives.
It does everything the OP i replied to wants.
Anyways fuck this place, people use their votes as a way to not encourage conversation but as a punishment tool.
Edit: Wow you changed your comment a lot in the edit!
Some of us have no issues trusting cold hard maths, cryptography and computer science behind bitcoin which give so much certainty and such clearly defined rules for how the system works. As compared to some central bankers who have no issues with whole countries going down the drain (Greece) due to their policies which often change based on politics.
There sure as hell is no chance that trillions of bitcoins will suddenly appear out of thin air Fed style.
I think the main problem with bitcoin is that it doesn't scale, because every transaction has to be approved by the entire network. More payments and a bigger network means the number of validations goes up quadratically.
People don't need to do a turn on a garbage collection route to vote on how their municipal garbage service is run.
But the existing financial and payment companies realize that this new technology makes them largely redundant hence they lobby and make it hard to acquire bitcoin for the average person with existing payment methods.
The attitude of banks and regulators towards bitcoin is the same of the motor industry and governments towards the electric car, somewhere between dismissive to fearful.
Give it time tho' I suppose, after all the same arguments were made by many industries against the early web and hell computers for that matter.