Quote from: iGROWyourBiz on April 15, 2014, 07:15:39 PM

For those who say it is "only a few years"....in this day and age, there should have been WIDESPREAD adoption by now. (look at social networks and other payment platforms). Look at DWOLLA -- just as revolutionary, started around the same time - facing GREATER HURDLES...yet....greater adoption rate (on less publicity). Granted - not open source and does not require the technical acumen -- but I remember when the ONLY place to buy a domain was Network solutions. You had to pay for TWO YEARS at $50 per year. PLUS a $50 setup fee. And YOU NEEDED to be a techie to set up all A, mx, CNAME etc records with a plain interface. Yet within a few years, there were competitors and better interfaces and widespread adoption.

DWOLLA got popular because of Bitcoin. Then we learned that Dwolla was just as reversible as the rest of the Banking system.

Major change happens slowly. People thought the .com boom changed the rules; but the crash at the end of the last century proved that was not the case. Bitcoin proves that "Know your customer" laws are a human rights issue. The average person can possibly console themselves that they are not likely to run into the reporting limits (that are no longer actually hard limits).

Bitcoin is also not ready for mass adoption. At an minimum, multi-party signatures have to be easy enough to use in a privacy-respecting way (meaning with a new address for every transaction). The network is still limited to about 7 transactions per second as well. If it goes "big" as-is: it will replace wire transfers, and not much else.

It took the industrial revolution about 300-400 years to happen after the invention of the printing press made the dissemination of information cheap and efficient. The governments in power fought the change: inventing copyright law to slow the spread of information. The agricultural revolution probably took a similar amount of time, if not longer. The invention of networked computers will lead to the information revolution if we don't kill ourselves first. I don't expect it to complete in my life-time. Sadly, many never learn the new technology. The old generations have to die off before truly revolutionary change is accepted.

Bitcoin is a revolutionary experiment. It is the "first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers." (Out-of-context Bruce Schneier quote) Governments and banks will attack it through legal and technical means. It may only have a small niche over the next 50 years. If that happens, it will be OK: because it is just an experiment.