Quote from: 1Referee on March 05, 2015, 02:19:07 PM

I believe in Bitcoin because it makes me the owner, and I mean the only owner of my money.

No one can tell me what to do with it, how to spend it, and how much I can spend.

Where can you send $100,000,000 for just $0.04 in fees? Can you tell me? Wink

And don't forget the endless possibilities of the blockchain and the network power behind it.

One of the few replies of interest so far, thank you.

In regards to sending $100 million, I don't know what kind of fees someone gets charged for that as I've never tried. My guess is that if you are a billionaire and in the habit of sending $100 million around, probably someone is paying you for the privilege of being the one to carry out your transactions, rather than the other way around. As for sending it with bitcoins... yes you can send 400,000 bitcoins with a low fee, but no, you can't send $100 million USD with that low fee... conversion charges on either side will eat you alive, not to mention market illiquidity. But even if you are right... sending very large sums like that is of use only to a tiny tiny fraction of the population, and small scale transactions that typify the economy generally have very low / no fees to the user.

As for no one telling you what to do with it, how to spend it, and how much you can spend... does someone tell you that with real money? The government takes its cut in taxes (which it will certainly take with bitcoin too if it ever grows outside of a tiny niche), and the rest you can do with as you please (outside of criminal activities), can you not? I mean maybe your significant other imposes some restrictions on your spending, but that hardly goes away regardless of what kind of currency you use.

As for blockchain technology... yes, there is a real innovation there, and it perhaps can find its uses. Though, I am not certain of its applicability for uses other than "online coins", since the design of the blockchain has been around for ~6 years now, and no major company has adopted it for other uses as far as I know. Still, even if cryptographically secured iterative ledgers modeled on the blockchain become commonplace in other commercial applications, that still says nothing about bitcoin itself being succesful.

Also, what do you mean by the only owner? In what regard do you own the bitcoin in your digital wallet more definitively than the dollar bill in your physical wallet or the bar of gold in your safe box?