Ninjastic
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: What is wrong with bitcoin and why it may never reach widespread adoption.
by
west77
on 24/06/2014, 11:58:22 UTC
Quote from: Kprawn on June 24, 2014, 11:38:15 AM

It is divisible... as is litecoin and any of the others.  The problem is not the question of divisibility but rather utility.  I am saying that buying .0000001 bitcoin in Zimbabwean fiat a few years ago would have been difficult.  I would have to pay 30 billion Zimbabwean dollars for that amount.  

Well that sucks for you, but image getting paid in BTC and converting it to Zim dollars! You would be a ZimGazillionaire.  Grin

It works both way....

If the Zimbabweans can count to a billion, to give change, adopting BTC should be easy, because they only need to count to a million.  Wink
Never mind billion... They had a 100 trillion dollar banknote at one point.  Yes, getting paid in BTC would be good- but I doubt you could convert it to something useful... I cannot imagine a farmer accepting BTC for wheat and by the time you converted it to Zimbabwean dollars it would be worthless due to the extreme hyperinflation.  You would have to convert it to USD... but back to my original question that your quote stops just short of... Were I in Zimbabwe at that point in time why would I want a bitcoin rather than USD?  So far nobody has told me what I need a bitcoin for that I cannot buy with a greenback at this point.

Absolutely, holding a bitcoin would have been better and more stable than holding 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars... but holding a pound of grain, a USD, an ounce of silver... a pet rock would have been a better bet at that time.  Out of those examples the only thing that BTC would have beat would be the pet rock (unless you used the pet rock to kill a farmer and take over the crop...)  On second thought- BTC would have been the least useful of the lot.  

So the question again is, why would I have wanted a bitcoin rather than a US dollar in that environment (or a Canadian dollar, or a German Mark or a British pound or a pet rock?)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Zimbabwe_%24100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg/375px-Zimbabwe_%24100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg