Quote from: MoonShadow on August 14, 2013, 12:42:25 AM

Quote from: tvbcof on August 13, 2013, 11:42:47 PM

Oh well. I've been saying this for years, and it's as difficult as ever to deal with Bitcoin...I'm trying to pull some fiat out now which is a nightmare...and putting me in a bad mood.

Why? I've been doing the majority of my bitcoin transactions on my android phone for well over a year now. The times that I have to type in the addresses (as opposed to just using the camera as a scanner) is somewhat annoying, but I'm confident some kind of standard will emerge there as well, in time. It's certainly no more difficult to type in an address string to buy something online at some new to me website than it is to buy something online using bitcoin; and that's also bound to get easier once browser linked wallet clients become trustworthy. I've been on commerce sites that buying with bitcoin was almost, but not quite "one click simple". I've scanned QR codes right off my monitor, and never even fired up my destop bitcoin client. In fact, my desktop client is hardly even used at all, these days. I'd be just as well to move those funds into cold storage. I'll admit that I still do the majority of my online buying using other methods than bitcoin, but that's likely to shift significantly if Amazon ever develops a payment method compatible with bitcoin.

I've never had any troubles buying trinkets with fiat except for a BE-USB which (refreshingly) was only available via Bitcoin when I bought it. So, Bitcoin is just not a compelling solution for this market space and I doubt that it ever will be.

I only run into issues when I want to buy something of significant value, and I just bought piece of construction equipement prompting an interest in my shuffling some financial assets. Such items are simply not available in exchange for Bitcoin, and again, I doubt they ever will be. Now I wish to replenish my fiat stash by cashing out some of my Bitcoin which has been a damn good speculative investment so far. And that is where the trouble lies.

I have never done anything illegal and I intend to pay full capital gains taxes so I have no need to launder any money at all. In spite of this I am rejected by Mt. Gox because my driver's license has a P.O. Box in addition to a physical address...like many people who live in my rural neighborhood.

Now this is not a Bitcoin problem per-se and is more associated with corp/government provoked hassles (or possible Mt. Gox solvency issues I suppose) but it's a reality which has been impacting Bitcoin in the past and is only getting worse. I don't see that the situation turning around, and indeed I think that the government has a lot of room to maneuver in making things orders of magnitude worse if/when they choose to do so. And there isn't jack-shit that the community can do about it.

Even when things are chipping along well, there is still significant fees doing damn near anything with BTC<->fiat. That has been the case since I've been involved and here again I don't see it changing. I am currently so far ahead that these fees will be negligible, but I'm 'lucky' compared to someone who just wants to buy Skittles or pot what-not, or convert the proceeds of their mining into something they want.

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Oh ya...'ease of use' is not a concern for me and I vastly prefer simple command-line utilities for anything remotely sensitive. I don't even use my Android or Window machine for e-mail any more, much less any financial and especially Bitcoin related work. I stopped doing so even before the Snowden revelations. I would not touch anything from Oracle (like Java) with a 10 foot pole. The only way I'll feel truly comfortable doing any computer stuff from here forward is if/when there is a completely open-source effort to build hardware, firmware, and all operating software to make a secure platform.