Quote from: glassuser on January 21, 2014, 05:38:33 AM

Although hoarding bitcoins and not spending them might make you more money, if people don't start using them to buy things the value is not going anywhere and bitcoin will just become an inflated stock taken over by an alt-coin that embraces spending.

That's one theory. Precious metals and a lot of other valuable and 'successful' things kind of argue against that though.

Another theory is that if everyone is using the global persistent block chain for everything all of the time, the nature of the Bitcoin network will change in ways that would make the solution lose a lot of the features that many of us value. Like, say, being being widely distributed on an infrastructure level (and thus, quite robust and hard to manipulate.)

To me the best of both worlds is to have Bitcoin (or something like it) have it's current highly distributed strengths while a plethora of alternates service the global consumer load and rest their value on how much BTC they are associated with (among other things.)

Bitcoin has some design issues and hitorical baggage which will make it hard to compete with purpose oriented alternates in various spheres (such as privacy, latency, etc) anyway and if it tries it will probably fail and eventually become a two-time loser.

In the mean time it is of value to try to push to the limits of the block size and start evaluating the impacts of transaction fees so it is great to see you trying to sell trinkets for BTC and I wish you the best of luck with it.