Quote from: Stylus on April 09, 2013, 04:02:55 AM

Quote from: jml on April 08, 2013, 08:58:15 PM

Unless paying with BTC has a guarantee of not getting defrauded, I would pay either PP or CC. I would only pay BTC if I have 100% trust on an entity or person.

It's an interesting irony that some people will require a great deal of trust to exist before they'll spend their no-trust currency.

In those cases, BTC is useless as an everyday currency unless payment processors begin to accept it. Central banks and governments can easily stop that from happening.

The additional time and difficulty involved with realizing BTC revenue compared to that of USD through a single payment processor will have many merchants such as myself taking a pass on it for now.

Lacking a strong merchant base, I don't think Bitcoin will ever be any more useful to most people than a virtual tulip would be.

I'm sure there are many people for whom that will be enough, however.

You seem to forget that bitcoin is becoming more ubiquitous as time goes by. Most people are investing in bitcoins now mainly as a safe haven investment knowing that a) it has a value and b) that a limited amount of bitcoins will be minted over time. This "rarity" is what stands out against other fiat currencies as investors have become concerned over what has happened with banks in Cyprus; i.e. your money isn't safe any more with banks and the situation over the Cypriot banks has echoed over other Euro countries. However, the appealing property of bitcoins which is favoured by many is that your money stays in your wallet and no one can steal it (unless you become a victim of a hack attack), i.e. you don't need a bank to invest or safeguard your bitcoins.

An analogy that I see with bitcoins is that I doubt that you, or anyone, would ever pass a large sum of money to a) a stranger and, b) have no guarantee/s of getting it back if the merchant backs out, and, c) have no trust established. This is why there are Certification Authorities (CA's such as Thawte and verisign in PKI infrastructures) to gather trust by verifying people's identities and issuing public and private keys to these entities where trust can be gained. We have this layer of trust when shopping on trusted sites with fiat currencies, but when it comes to exchanging bitcoins, a layer of protection FOR THE BUYER is missing which is what I believe the bitcoin community needs; a semi distributed authority/ies that can mediate disputes/chargebacks between the merchant and consumer, etc.