Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Walmart.com
by
imnichol
on 04/08/2010, 17:28:39 UTC
What I'm trying to say is that if you want to bring a presentation of Bitcoins to something like a board of director's meeting for Wal-mart, you don't want some skeptic typing in the words "Bitcoins" and getting nothing but porn sites, drug traders, and "other enterprises" that such major corporations don't want to be associated with.  If they are in the fringe of the users of this technology, they can be ignored and it won't be an issue.  If those kind of users are the primary users of this network, that could be a huge problem.

Enterprises that are early adopters for technology can also be filtered out in such situations, but not completely.  I'm also saying that there are so many other applications for micropayments that can be beneficial for Bitcoins that concentrating on just these other subversive kinds of enterprises is not going to be healthy in terms of spreading information about Bitcoins.  Concentrating on just these kinds of more anarchists type of applications might even backfire in terms of trying to get "mainstream" acceptance of the concept.

For this to be used on something like Walmart.com, it would most certainly have to be "in the mainstream" for it to be accepted.

I haven't actually seen any sort of porn or drug transactions using BTC... there was the guy that talked about sending heroin, but that was just a thought experiment.  Going back to the original comment that you quoted, I feel that what both you and creighto are saying is self-evident.  I wouldn't expect walmart to use bitcoins unless there was an economic reason that didn't make them look like pedophiles/drug dealers/bad people.  To me, you might as well be saying that the sky is blue.