Quote from: The MadHatter on September 17, 2010, 02:59:20 PM

((lots of good stuff removed))
The Madhatter

Thanks for your well considered response. I agree with all of your points. I want to re-emphasize I am a bitcoin supporter and have had only good experiences using the bitcoin software, bitcoin community websites, and discussing on this forum! I take bitcoin very seriously as a fundamentally important project - the idea of a decentralized currency, a p2p economic system, is inherently exciting, and bitcoin's design and implementation seems brilliant once you understand how the pieces all fit together.

All of that, however, still isn't enough for bitcoin to actually succeed and live up to its potential. What can loosely be described as "social factors" (and of course luck!) are in my opinion much more determinative of success than the correctness of the concepts or the skill of implementation. Those things have to be right to create the possibility of success (defined as long-term preservation of value and ability to transact in bitcoins for a wide variety of goods and services), but are not sufficient. The high ambition of bitcoin creates a lot of hurdles to jump over that most projects don't face. Satoshi has guts! As do other people who invest substantial effort and resources in building the bitcoin community, I remain very impressed by what already exists and has been accomplished.

I definitely believe bitcoin has the potential to deliver a "better user experience" of money than traditional systems, but at this point in time I don't think the chicken-and-egg problem of creating adequate diversity of goods/services and ease of transaction in bitcoins without a large user community and vice versa has been accomplished. I will try to offer my best practical suggestion: someone should develop a very easy to deploy "pay with bitcoins!" web widget for people selling services over the web. The kind of small startups funded by ycombinator might be interested in innovative payment systems and they are often at a stage where revenues are so small that even minor paths to monetization would interest them. I don't know exactly how you architect an ultra easy to use (for both service providers and consumers) bitcoin payment button, but I see it as something that could really drive adoption.