no no, what he said is that having your money in the bank gives you so much more opportunity.
the part when he said opportunity value, he means you get the full extent of what it can do by being able to use it at many more places.
for instance, you can't buy a videocard from newegg if the cash is in a safe in your house or even sitting in your pocket.
It's the same idea if your bitcoins only exist on a computer that is turned off, there is zero opportunity to actually use them. It really was a very insightful thought he shared.
No, that's not what he's talking about. It only takes a few minutes to turn your computer on if you had to spend Bitcoins. Heck, you'd wait on average longer than that just for the transaction to confirm, and I guarantee you'd wait much, much longer for something like a check to clear. Heck, even a credit card transaction takes up to a few days. It's not an issue of your PC not being on at that very moment at all.
What it is an issue of is the economic use of that money. Let's say you get some Bitcoins, you hold onto them for a year, and then you spend them. In that interim period they had precisely zero economic activity. They didn't contribute to any economy, they didn't help anyone make money, etc. Now, let's say you get some dollars in your bank account, you hold onto them for a year, and then you spend them.
Well, see, those dollars actually
did have an economic impact, because your bank turned around and lent them out to people buying homes, new businesses starting up, and other economic activities. Those dollars may have been exchanged many times from person to person, business to business, all while you just "thought" you had a static balance in your bank account. So that amount of money "sitting" in your bank account actually had many times its value in effect on GDP. Your Bitcoins, however, had precisely zero impact.
That is the fundamental difference between using a bank and stuffing money under your mattress that we are talking about here, and in the absence of
trustworthy Bitcoin banks, the only thing you can do with your Bitcoins is the equivalent of stuffing them under your mattress.