Quote from: Morecoin Freeman on January 11, 2015, 03:03:40 AM

Quote from: riiiiising on January 11, 2015, 02:16:48 AM

Quote from: jzcjca00 on January 11, 2015, 12:40:55 AM

COIN will solve three major problems that are stopping most people from investing:

1. It's hard to buy bitcoins. You have to find an exchange, open an account, go through the verification nightmare, get money there, and then (depending on the exchange) buy a little bit at a time until the exchange decides to trust you. It's 100 times harder than going online and buying any stock or mutual fund in your existing brokerage account.

2. It's hard to store bitcoins. You either have to trust it with an online exchange, which everyone says is unwise, or you practically need a computer science degree to figure out how to keep it some kind of cold storage. The average Joe would be unwise to try this at home.

3. It's extremely hard to invest retirement funds in it, which is the only investment funds many people have. (You can do it by setting up an IRA LLC, but that's expensive in terms of money, effort, and time. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396783.0 for details.)

Once COIN is approved, the average Joe can login to his retirement account and buy bitcoins with practically no effort.

I don't think that the approval of COIN will necessarily immediately launch Bitcoin to the moon, but it will make it much more likely to happen once some triggering event gets the ball rolling.

Of course, it's possible that the price will rise dramatically after the SEC announces that COIN is approved, but before anyone has a chance to actually buy it. It might be worth setting up the IRA LLC and investing Roth IRA funds in bitcoins, where they can grow tax free, before that happens!

So even bitcoiners admit that it doesn't work as a currency because it's too difficult for people to trade in and out of regular fiat and storing them properly is too complex and dangerous.

So the answer is... open an ETF to allow computer illiterate people the chance to "invest" in a currency that is too complicated for them to use in the first place. Brilliant!

Something about a learning curve and new developments making the process more easy over time.

Most new generations know how to use a personal computer, this wasn't always te case.

On the other hand: Since technology becomes more and more ubiquitous and generally accepted, easier to use, etc. People aren't that into the core technologies anymore. They just use the technology. If the technology hasn't got a real use or appeal to the people, they won't use it "just 'cause it's cool"
(This isn't a bad thing in my books, but one should always remember that)