Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on July 19, 2013, 12:52:30 AM

I doubt it. I bought a $1,600 domain using namecheap and sent them irreversible funds by Bitcoin. OH NOES was I worried, did I use a trusted bank as a third party? Nope. namecheap has a solid reputable business and they stand to lose a lot ripping me off. I had not a second of doubt/fear sending them the BTC.

Imagine your local power company, amazon.com, newegg, namecheap, (insert company you already trust here) asked you to pay with Bitcoins would you have a problem? I don't think most people would.

Now for fly by the night never heard of the "company" (which isn't even a real company) until they got out of noob jail and starting asking for tens of thousands of bitcoins in "pre-orders" well yeah you probably want to escrow that, then again if they asked for cash you probably would want to escrow it just the same.

I couldn't agree more!

There's a significant chunk of the wider population out there who would be perfectly willing to try Bitcoin transactions with real, identifiable businesses and individuals -- i.e., non-anonymous entities. In my view, the Bitcoin community does itself a disservice with regard to promoting wider acceptance when it focuses on anonymity and its partial solutions created by the problems of anonymity. For example, when a new person with money to spend first encounters Bitcoin and gets told all about the WOT and how absolutely essential it is for conducting business safely with Bitcoin, what do you suppose that does to their confidence in Bitcoin as a currency? "You want me to trust a bunch of pseudonymous ratings of other pseudonymous user accounts? Are you kidding?" By contrast, when someone walks into a pub in London and pays for a round of pints with Bitcoins, nobody cares about the WOT, and your experience paying for a domain name is exactly analogous: far more confidence comes from dealing with a real, identifiable, non-anonymous entity that is subject to real laws and real liabilities than will ever come from any of the solutions so far proposed (WOT, etc.) to the problems created by anonymous transactions.

Don't get me wrong: I fully appreciate the option to conduct business anonymously, and I have no problem with that. But if we really want to encourage wider adoption, fixating on anonymity and how to remedy the problems that anonymity creates just won't cut it.

There's a separate thread called Is Focusing on Anonymity Over Privacy Holding Back Bitcoin? based on an article that tries to expand on this line of thought a bit.