Quote from: Ruxum on June 12, 2011, 12:59:17 PM

Being able to buy life's necessities in your local market in countries around the world would make it a legitimate GLOBAL currency.

Can you buy bread in Ireland? Eggs at the market in Thailand?

The question is how to get the masses to use it...

This actually is hindered by bitcoin's fundamental value of deflation. Fiat currencies partly get their value due to the assumed stability given by such a widely circulated "commodity". This stability is from both (hopefully) well-thought out adjustments in supply/demand by the issuing government, and by the widely used nature of a central currency. Indeed this was the thinking behind the US Constitution's declaration that the federal government would be the only governing body allowed to issue currency. A single currency greatly simplifies the task of quickly assigning known *relative* prices between goods. Now, the founding fathers obviously couldn't predict the massive power the internet would bring to the citizenry to upend government power.

That is, of course, assuming internet neutrality is declared an unalienable right of the people. I am not worried as much about government intervention specifically against bitcoin directly, as I am about a growing tide of corporate interests looking to break up the internet as we know it, wanting to carve it into fiefdoms of media conglomerate control (a la cable television).