Quote from: gannicus on March 19, 2014, 11:39:55 PM

The problem with bitcoins are not the hoarders, spending bitcoin like idiots will not change it and make bitcoin become mainstream. What bitcoin needs is easier ways to convert it quickly into fiat money, which is which most people care about nowadays, regardless if you like it or not. If someone who has never heard of bitcoin wants to buy bitcoin today he or she must register in some exchange, send documents, wait confirmation, send deposit, wait confirmation, buy it, and transfer to the wallet. If someone wants to sell it, it is even worse, because the person must also do all this and hope for the money to arrive to his bank account. The real "bottleneck" of the bitcoin economy relies on 2 or 3 big exchanges which all the connection fiat-crypto happens, added to a few spare ATM around the world where people can at most buy bitcoin for a price much above the spot. Take gold for example. People hoard gold, banks probably are storaging a huge fraction of all the gold, but this does not matter to make gold "mainstream", because gold can be bought and sold easily around the world, which is not the case of bitcoin today. You may love bitcoin and have a thousand reasons to defend it like I do, but you all must admit that there is no practical way to trade (and when I say trade it is buy AND sell) bitcoins today and to make it worse one of the biggest exchanges just went bankrupt weeks ago. You may come and give me thousands of small bitcoins business that allow people to trade them quickly (I particularlly don't know any, but I suppose they exist) but that's still the problem - they are small, no one knows them, and that's why bitcoin is still unable to "break its shell". This shell will be broken the day I can buy and sell it quickly and with a huge depth on the buy and sell side.

I agree with what you're saying but it's all baby steps right now. Sure it's not as convenient as it needs to be to convert fiat to Bitcoin but that's why the infrastructure needs improving. If you look back even a year ago you can see the improvements and the capital flowing in. Things won't change overnight you just need to look at the overall trend and decide if it's going in the right direction. Bitcoin right now is all about foresight, people need to get away from the "early adopter" or "missed the train" mindset, we're still very much in the infancy of Bitcoin's potential.