Yes, I am aware. And the Android part was discussed earlier in this topic. I didn't know that XBox was linux powered (I do in fact find it surprising). And if indeed someone managed to pull off with Bitcoin what Android did pull off with Linux, that is wrapping something completely unusable by normal people into a foolproof and useful thing, that would exactly address my concern. But there is major amounts of work before we get there.

This is a "unless we get our asses in gear and pay attention to what's happening out there, the thing we care about is going to become irrelevant in a New York minute" post.

Just like someone else said above, it depends on your definition of successful.

Adoption is growing yes. But is it growing fast enough ? This is not your grandma's world anymore, this is the age of internet : anything that's not growing exponentially has a strong likelihood to die out.

Also, yes, I do look around. I note that I still can't go buy my coffee at startbucks with btc. That I can't pay my taxes with BTC. That if I try to pay someone in my friend & families with BTC, they look at me like I'm some kind of weirdo.

And I'm saying, the whole point of the OP in fact, that if we don't get our asses in gear, BTC will get the living daylight beaten out of it by simpler, faster (yes potentially weaker and less safe solutions - but then who cares about that shit when you buy a cup of coffee ?) coming from the fastest growing parts of the internet: China, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Africa

I am with you in the wishful thinking department. I truly want to see bitcoin succeed.

But I'm sorry you have to be realistic: what you say is simply not true. Buying a house or a car, or getting paid by your employer, or paying your taxes with BTC is simply not possible in 2014 in 99.99% of the cases.

Fair enough about Android.

Not so about OSX which is built on top of BSD

In both cases, much of the original spirit of Linux (openness & freedom) has been watered down to the extreme.

I'm not sure I'd be happy if making bitcoin successful meant curtailing its key attribute to the extent android and OSX have ravaged the original attributes of Linux and BSD. On an Android phone, half of the things you can do with a desktop are impossible unless you root your phone. The phone isn't really yours anymore.

No, by faster, I don't mean some lame-ass altcoin where the only "innovation" they created was changing 5 characters in the source code to change the block production rate.

Something like a rock-solid implementation of side-chains or off-chain transactions is what I'm thinking about.


I am not talking about watering down bitcoin's security.

Non-smartphone are called feature phones. They're used by more than half of the people on the planet. They look like this:

http://mobilerji.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/cell-pile.jpg

They have a CPU, and one can code tiny apps for them. Building a simple lightweight bitcoin client is possible.

The *demand* for a simple mobile payment solution on feature phone is huge.
See here if you don't believe me : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa



China and India may.
Africa certainly does not.

Wholeheartedly agreed. A good example of that is being able to pay in places where traditional payment methods create a privacy concern. For example in some european country, being able to pay via NFC as your board a train (swipe and go) was abandoned because it was deemed illegal - would allow to track who goes where fine grained. Had they used bitcoin, problem solved.

*BUT*, and that's exactly the point I'm trying to make, unless we go and compete head to head with the easier payment methods out there, such as the chinese equivalents of paypals and paypal itself (who's sorely in need of stiff competition to start offering better services), we are never going to leave that niche where only bitcoin can live. And the problem is : that niche is *small*.


This is cool indeed.


This is where I disagree with you. The one thing that Facebook should have taught anyone working in the digital economy, it's that once something has mushroomed to getting more than 90% of the market, they damn near undisplaceable (even if they're not a particularly brilliant product - fb never was). I'm worried that by the time this bitcoin killer app comes about, it will face an enormous barrier to entry. Whereas if bitcoin tries to move to the emerging market space first, its natural advantages will make it a damn sure winner.

I'd get into the habit of taking a look at the time someone registered their account before calling them a noob. I bought my coins at $5. I guess that makes me a noob compared to some. But perhaps not compared to others.

Says the bozo who registered in 2013 and thinks that makes him an old-timer.

I would like to politely disagree.

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).


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.

An excellent article about where the digital economy is going.

If bitcoin ever stands a chance to succeed, it needs to carve itself a niche in that shitstorm coming from emerging markets.

If it fails to do that, it'll be irrelevant in two years.

http://www.slideshare.net/yiibu/the-emerging-global-web

rEAtDjh3fAk2r6WPMpWH5ywStemooSyrC

dude where's my order book ? 

nefario : do you have an eta for when the site works again ?

glbse is broken right now.

nefario said he's upgrading, but its been alamost a full day now

do you have a history of dividend paid on your site ?

so finally got a MtGox account.

not hard to setup, but I can't wire anything in there from eurpe without sending them like a ton of doxx

takes for ever and i'm not particularly happy to be obliged to give them my id.

also, wire still takes two effing days. and i can't send money during week-ends, looks like banking computers take a weel deserved rest on sundays.

dont freaking bank know about this thing called the internet ?

best method is still to meet someone who has some, like a miner, and buy it for cold hard cash

I would like to know too

yeah, that's the one

Yeah getting your hands on coins is a pain. i managed to find someone in my city who sold me some
thats the easiest