Quote:
Originally Posted by Pokerlogist
It's nice to see the sophisticated pro/con discussions in this thread. I'm no expert on currency but I've done some informal surfing of bitcoin websites in the last few days. Looks to me like the distribution of bitcoins is definitely widening over the last 6 months.
The two great generators of bitcoin usage may turn out to be gambling and porn. The Satochi dice website seems real popular. Other similar sites are starting. I would think that any simple lottery site is is going to eventually attract a lot of people. There now also some crude webcam pornsites payable with bitcoins cropping up as well. Gambling and porn may not be the most respected businesses but they are always in demand. Of course, the users of those sites tend to want anonymity and bitcoins do that. So I see bitcoin usage growing well for the next six months at least.
The downside of all this is that gambling and porn are two businesses that attract governmental attention. Governments may already be concerned about the usage of bitcoins to fund serious criminal activity. I imagine that a public announcement by the Western governments that they intend to crack down on bitcoin usage would send the market value of the bitcoin downward even if bitcoins are resilient to elimination.
Someone cloned SatoshiDice, called it BTCDice and it has lower fees and it motivated SD to lower fees too. MyriadCoins is similar but you don't have to use your own Bitcoin software since you specify the receiving address.
Porn is slow going it seems, but there are the subreddits r/girlsgonebitcon and r/decrypto and cam4btc.
Government 'doing' something in this case will just lend it legitimacy as a viable thing and also probably spur work on making it even more resilient, secretive and anonymous. The main drawback would be the loss or delay of larger businesses adopting it, but that's just in the country of the particular governments who condemn it. That will make other jurisdictions more attractive for running businesses that use bitcoin. Also it is already true to a small scale that you can't stop businesses from accepting coins indirectly. If you sell giftcards someone will buy them and sell to someone for bitcoins.