Quote from: ~Coinseeker~ on April 03, 2014, 01:40:12 AM

Even if this is true, this is the number one reason, Bitcoin will fail as a currency. Average people need to buy it and spend it. Investors just pumping the price up means nothing toward usefulness. It's a temporary and artificial valuation.

Everyone who responded to the above quote, is totally missing the big picture.

1. You're under the assumption that because VC's are dumping money into a trend, it's automatically going to succeed. How many VC's lost money in the .com bust? VC's aren't psychic. The just represent pools of money, large enough to take gambles on a lot of different things.

2. You can have all the infrastructure you want, if the value of Bitcoin is based on speculation, it will never be stable. Thus, the majority of the general public, is not going to put money into Bitcoin, just to make purchases and certainly not as a store of value. It's way too risky.

3. Since the Bitcoin mantra is "buy and hold", anyone you convince to buy, is going to hold. They aren't buying Bitcoin to make purchases. Debit cards don't cost anything and that's why VISA and Mastercard are destroying every other payment type, by volume.

4. You're now going to say how much merchants can benefit. Agreed...but merchants can't make people buy Bitcoin, to save them money. Consumers don't care if a purchase costs the merchant 3% + $0.25

5. The poor distribution of Bitcoin, means the majority of the planet will not have access to Bitcoin. People can't spend, what they don't have. Again, doesn't matter how many merchants accept it. This is why the price keeps falling, even though a boat load of merchants have come on board, since the $1200 high. Bitcoin value is not based on merchant adoption or actual transactions. It's based on speculation and it's killing Bitcoin, as a currency.

It has become abundantly clear to me that while the future of monetary transactions will owe a great debt to Bitcoin, it was not distributed properly, it was not promoted properly (buy and hold) and it does not scale well enough, to be all you want it to be. At least, not all by itself. If it survives, it will do so as part of a larger collection of digital currencies that together will form ubiquity.

Bitcoin will serve one group of the population. Maybe Litecoin another section, Dogecoin another...and so on and so forth, until the entire planet has access to digital currency. Currencies with better distribution models like Dogecoin and others, have a better opportunity at having a much larger share of the population as holders. It doesn't need to be speculated to $1000 each, it just needs to be available and useful. I personally would rather have $100 in a stable currency for spending purposes, that didn't require me to deal with 0.01. I'd rather look at 100.00. With Bitcoin being up in the nosebleed section, it just doesn't make sense for me to buy-in and use as a currency, or as a speculative investment, knowing these overwhelming limitations. Crypto is crypto. Whichever one is more user friendly is the winner, because they all do the same thing.