Currently there is a high bar to get money exchanged into and out of Bitcoin. Its a mess: costly, time consuming and a big hassle. Seriously! Have you tried using an exchange? Even the most trusted one (Coinbase of San Francisco) makes it incredibly difficult to get money in and out of BTC. Fortunately, this situation is gradually improving.
Where Bitcoin really shines (or more accurately, when it will shine), occurs at the time when more vendors choose to leave revenues in BTC, pending their own purchases from suppliers, shareholder payouts, or simply as retained savings.
When this happens, all sorts of good things will follow
A growing fraction of sellers leave their bitcoin in their wallets, realizing that they will need to spend it for their own labor and materials.
Gradually, wild exchange-rate gyrations diminishnot because fewer people are exchanging money, but because the Bitcoin supply/demand value is driven more by actual commerce than it is by speculation.
Sellers begin pricing merchandise in Bitcoin rather than legacy units (i.e. national currencies)because they are less anxious to exchange out of BTC immediately after each sale.
When sellers begin letting a fraction of bitcoin revenues rideand as they begin pricing goods and services in BTCa phenomenal tipping point will follow
If goods and services are priced in BTC, then everyone involved saves money and engages in transactions more efficiently.
If goods and services are priced in BTC, then the public will begin to perceive exchange rate volatility as a changing dollar rather than a changing bitcoin.
If buyers also begin to save their BTC (i.e. they do not worry about immediately moving it back to national currency), it means that Bitcoin is being perceived as a stored valuenot just an exchange chit. That may seem to be a subtle footnote, but the ramifications are earth shaking. That earthquake is the world gradually moving away from centralized treasury-issued bank notes and toward a unified currency that we can all trust.
People, everywhere, will one day place their trust in a far more robust and worthy mechanism than paper promissory notes printed by transient, regional governmentsgovernments that turn on the printing press or borrow from unborn generations whenever they have a shortfall. Thats where Bitcoin comes in. It is a brilliantly crafted mechanism that is fully distributed, p2p, transaction verified (yet private), has a capped supply and is secure. And it has already achieved a two-sided network.