Quote:
Originally Posted by AlbertoKnox
I wear the hat for safety, man. If there end up not being major technical problems with bitcoin (and I have no reason to think there are, I just can't check for myself) then it blows all other currencies away in every way that matters. The main issue would be bootstrapping from no value and it's already over that hump.
There is probably a fight coming, I'd guess it'll be mostly PR, but that could be pretty damaging. If I'm out of touch here it's that I wrongly think regular people are ready to give the third finger to government and won't care what they say about this.
I think your numbers are off because you want it to succeed so badly. It's easy to get blinded by something you want. To get to the numbers you want, you have to try to understand what it would take for someone who has no interest in BitCoin to adopt it at that level. Most people will adopt something new if it's a ton better or if they have no choice. The early adopters are still coming on board, and there's a real critical time coming up between when the early mainstream jumps on board and before the early adopters just get bored and move on. Something needs to drive that.
I don't think that mining was implemented properly to drive widespread adoption. Something like this will take a LONG time for people to come to. However, 1/3 of all coins are already mined. I would have liked to have seen a mining pattern much closer to the number of users expected to adopt. Stretching out the current pattern from 4 years to 20 years between drops would have been better IMO. We basically have a bunch of people who got in there early and have a TON of coins, and then everyone fighting for table scraps later. I think you get a lot better adoption by having more people getting significant chunks of the mining action (people love getting stuff for free), rather than blowing its load early. But it's too late now, and not a huge flaw.
But think about for each situation you listed *why* the laggards and mainstream people would actually adopt BitCoin. What advantages does it have to them over the current system? What disadvantages does it have? What would it take to switch? Even if something is better, switching is costly for big business.
You discount BitCoin^2, but that's absolutely essential to judging valuation. You claim you could get out before most, but that's more of an exit strategy than valuation.