Quote from: evolve on May 02, 2013, 06:49:10 PM

Quote from: Jutarul on May 02, 2013, 05:10:11 PM

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=180882.msg1888636#msg1888636

While those are all nice reasons to buy bitcoin, none of those reasons justify the price rise from sub 20 to 260 in less than 4 months.....None of those things are new, and all of those reasons come with a catch:

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1) wealth confiscation and reduced/no counter-party risk (brainwallets and free market valuation)

Exchanges being hacked, Exchanges stealing money, Wallet services getting hacked, Your wallet getting Hacked or deleted, Misplaced, stolen, or forgotten private key

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2) quasi-instant trade settlement (no delivery games)

Unless you use escrow (which involves trusting a third party) the buyer risks a no delivery of goods and/or services with no recourse. Check out the scammer accusation subforum.

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3) financial privacy (user adjustable)

This is definitely one of BTCs strong suits, its ability to be psuedoanonymous. Its anonymity is unwieldy in practice, though. You can never use exchanges, FTF meetings can identify you, etc...I suppose you could do dead drops or something though. You could just as easily buy a prepaid credit card with cash (or just use cash) for anonymous purchases.

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4) batteries included (payment processing)

You also have to download a bloated blockchain (which takes forever, hogs space on your computer, and may contain child porn) or trust a third party wallet source

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5) separation of power (money supply governance, miners vs. users)

As far as I can tell, the miners and devolpers are the government. When the blockchain forked a month or two ago, the developers and miners (or at least a mojority of them) decided which fork would be the valid one, and the choice was to comply or be left behind. The developers also have the power to change the protocol as they see fit, giving them the ultimate power over bitcoin. As an end user, I have no power over any of that.

+1 !

I wanted to post something similar a few days ago. Those catches seem to be ignored too much by too many. Another one is that transactions are not instant. Sometimes they take far too long to be practical for daily use.
I myself invested in 2011 in BC and made some good money on the way. But I never used it to pay anything with it! I prefer using paypal or similar.
There I know that if something goes wrong, there is some way out of it. In BC there just isnt. And it turned out that this fact attracted many scammers so that nobody trusts anyone anymore.