Quote from: btctrader22 on December 16, 2014, 10:46:26 AM

Quote from: NeuroticFish on December 16, 2014, 10:33:43 AM

Bitcoin is already a success (just the price doesn't really reflect that) and bitcoin already is there on quite a lot of emerging markets.

I would like to politely disagree.

I guess that we have a different perception of what success means. As technology, it is proven to work, it is copied by a lot of other coins and it starts to be known (or heard of) by the masses.

Quote from: btctrader22 on December 16, 2014, 10:46:26 AM

Bitcoin is currently a success in the same way Linux is/was a success: in a very tiny niche (geeks, sysadmins, tech-savvy folks, etc ...). Unfortunately, Linux never came out of that niche. It's still in there 15+ years later

In the same way, Bitcoin has most certainly not reached the mainstream, and especially not in emerging markets where most people only have old "feature" phones and close to nil in terms of technical skills.

To do so would require a order of magnitude improvement in ease of use, speed of confirming transactions and number of transactions per second the network can handle.

This is a giant missed opportunity: the next 4 billion people who are going to come online are from emerging markets, and bitcoin is simply to hard/too slow for them to use as compared to the alternatives outlined in that presentation (especially towards the end).

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What bitcoin needs (especially for its price) is to increase the awareness everywhere on earth, because even if it's there, not many actually know about it, what it is and what can it do.

What bitcoin needs is to become *way* simpler, and *way* faster. And it also needs a client on older phones (non-smartphone).
If it does this, awareness will just be a byproduct.

These are only steps to gain awareness, imo.

Bitcoin will not go faster. If you want "faster", find another coin (DOGE?). Don't get me wrong, I would like to see a solution to speed it up, but I don't think there's any.

Making it work with non-smartphones sounds strange to me. Would you like that the bank pays for a product from your credit card money just from a phonecall from your number without checking anything? I guess not. Bitcoin is not just money. It's SAFE/SECURE money. And the software to use bitcoin has to comply, else it will be a loss on the long time. However, if you think otherwise, start a business that handles bitcoin only from something as simple as a phonecall, maybe I'm wrong and you'll have success.

And fyi: emerging countries have cheaper phones with more features than yours, just may not have well-known brand names, that's all Wink