Quote from: zby on July 02, 2011, 12:12:20 PM

Quote from: znort987 on July 02, 2011, 09:41:05 AM

Quote from: calista on July 02, 2011, 08:13:50 AM

as proven by its history before june, bitcoins' price will drop off unless there is big influx of new committed users.

bitcoins is already all over the press - people who would hear of it would have already done so.

unless there is some big new development that proves bitcoins can have exciting new users, people will become inactive and its users will drop off.

in fact the slow drop has already started as we all now witness.

I think at this point, it's fair to say that the geek community
has heard of and likely toyed with bitcoin. Which is why the
price is flattening out.

For it to pick up again, we are going to need to enlarge the
market to have it reach joe user (your mum, your cousin
the facebook user, etc ...)

For that to happen, we're still a long way off, and what's
most notably lacking is the level of ease of use that type
of folks are used to (paypal style). At this point in time,
bitcoin is way too complicated for them.

Also, for the next market quantum leap to happed, we
are going to need a full mobile implementation (most non-geek
type I interact with have pretty much stopped using their
desktop PC in favor of a smartphone).

A bitcoin client on android that is NFC-compatible, combined with
a bitcoin NFC terminal for merchants that directly hooks into an
exchange (so the merchant gets whatever monopoly money he
likes best directly).

Now that would change things quite a bit.

The problem is that bitcoin is not really mobile friendly - you need to wait an hour on average to have the transaction confirmed - this is OK for online stores but is useless for mobile payments.

Re-read, with particular attention to "directly hooks into an exchange".

If you don't have an account at an exchange but you don't want to wait for your beer, open an account at an exchange before heading out to the pub (or while waiting for confirms on your first beer order). Any exchange that fails to join the exchange-to-exchange SWIFT - uh I mean fast - private network so their customers can get quick service at retailers using any exchange on that private network might just not be the favourite exchange, at least for retail purchasing applications, of most retail-shopper types.

-MarkM-