Quote from: brg444 on September 08, 2014, 09:35:32 PM

Bitcoin is first and foremost money. Store of value first, then currency and eventually unit of account.

All this "payment system" and transactional utilities are bells and whistles. Merchant adoption is important but it is not what drives bitcoin.

Yes. This is also my opinion and it has popped into the forefront of my mind with that paypal news.

However it is also true that transactional utility is a necessary prerequisite for bitcoin to be money. The expectation of value comes from that. Without this utility, noone would use bitcoin as a store of value.

Quote from: brg444 on September 08, 2014, 09:35:32 PM

In my opinion there is only a minority of people that care to use Bitcoin for daily transactions. Most people "hoard" it as a store of value and to speculate.

Bitcoin lacks consumer protections. It's actually not a good payment system in that regard. Those protections may or may not be necessary, but if the masses want them, they need to be built on top... maybe paypal is doing this?

Quote from: brg444 on September 08, 2014, 09:35:32 PM

This is what has driven the price of Bitcoin from 0 to now. And if the phenomenon continues on its exponential pace like it has for the past years, then we will be fine.

Wether or not the phenomenon continues depends largely on what happens regarding the monetary crisis of our fiat currencies. If things don't change, there's only so many libertarians / agorists / anarcho-capitalists that care enough to embrace bitcoin. I think we've exhausted this demographic at this point. As Mike Hearn points out: bitcoin might get stuck in a niche. That would suck bigtime, we need people to wake up and understand what money is and isn't, but sleep feels nice and dreams are happy so people continue to sleep. People will only wake up when they feel pain.

Quote from: brg444 on September 08, 2014, 09:35:32 PM

This is also why these news have no impact on the price. They bring awareness sure, but they don't bring in new "investors". I don't expect they should. Frankly, apart from a couple of minor use cases, there are little to no incentives to use Bitcoin as a currency vs. fiat as it is right now. And that's not a problem.

If Bitcoin currently achieves only one thing and that is to present an alternative to the state-sponsored fiat currencies and keep their masters relatively thoughtful, then much is achieved: I'm sure that bail-ins (cyprus-style) are being considered on a larger scale, but the "problem" of people flocking to Bitcoin in the aftermath of such action and subsequent rally in btc price clearly exists.

The current financial crisis is really a monetary crisis. And money is at the heart of civilization.

Interesting times we live in.