What's your point? We were talking about currencies. Gold itself doesn't work as a currency (at least, it has enormous and obvious disadvantages).

These things seem generally true of whatever currency you use. And then, bitcoins can be transferred anywhere in the world almost instantly at almost no cost.

(Sure, less people use Bitcoin right now, but that doesn't say anything about it's inherent betterness/worseness.)

Oh, I thought you already mentioned that it's an advantage, I don't really know the details personally.

But I doubt you actually disagree that it's an improvement over cash/CC?

So maybe if you commit a major crime or something, people can track you down. That's maybe not even a bad thing (especially in the way long-run when the "justice system" isn't all about arresting stoners and stuff).

But your wife isn't gonna hire internet detectives to figure out if you watched porn or not. And the government isn't going through that trouble to loosely guess how much poker you played. For every day things that you'd just kind of prefer some privacy about, Bitcoin seems way better than cash or CC.

Tom, I see where you are coming from. You want to initially get the coins in more user's hands to bootstrap more effectively. I think this goal is fine, although I have heard an economist (not a forumtard, an actual professor) argue that the initial distribution matters even less than it did for gold and silver. I think there ARE good ways to do this, but they are very expensive.

Changing the reward does nothing to help though. The number of coins assigned by the network in various reward periods is not going to change the distribution very much towards your goal. The coins all still go to the miners. It will just change the price curve over time. This does not support your argument. You need some mechanism of distribution based on unique identities for this system to work. It would also require a massive amount of manpower and money to make sure the coins were going to unique individuals and not fraudulent actors. The "Bitcoin Faucet", which gives away increasinly tiny fractions of a bitcoin to new users, has to deal with this problem.

I am trying to think of reasonable scenarios to support your position to speculate on whether they might happen. Suppose Facebook assigns 100 FaceCoins to all their users and uses their clout to get it accepted at more merchants than the 900 or so that currently accept bitcoin, and uses some identity verification to limit fraudulent new accounts from collecting coins. What if eBay mandates that all their merchants accept BayCoin. Ok here's a better one: What if a mobile phone operator in Africa made MobileCoin, made it accepted at more merchants, acted as an exchange, offered to buy mined mobilecoin at 1c per coin to give it some value, and preinstalled some on every phone. These initially seem to have some merit, but they are deeply flawed and I don't think they will happen.

The fundamental problem with any scenario is maintaing development motivation and security while rivaling the advantages of bitcoin. You are right that bitcoin is an insignificant dot right now, and any of these scenarios overcome the network effect of bitcoin at its current size, although this only gets harder as time goes on. But none of these companies would be motivated to do this. They are looking at 10mil just to eliminate the security risk from mining pool attacks. The company name will get dragged through the mud in the media as their currency is used to buy drugs and launder money. The more I think about this the more ******ed it sounds. There is little financial incentive for anyone to undertake this, unless they change the code to benefit themselves, like SolidCoin and iXcoin did. Unfortunately doing this also makes them inferior to bitcoin, and people reject them as soon as this is made public. Any company with the money to overcome the network effect would never opt for a decentralized currency. They would always centralize it to give more control over what the currency is used for, and to make more profit off of transactions. That makes it inferior to bitcoin. Bitcoin is still an experiment with a very real chance of failure too. You will not see any large corporation pick this up until they are reasonably certain it will work. To start their own alternative is even more risky. Would you agree that launching a bitcoin competitor at this point requires a lot of money to bootstrap?

I agree with you in theory that the cryptocurrency winner does not have to be bitcoin. I just can't think of any scenarios that can reverse bitcoin's first mover advantage, other than possibly a massive government/bank crackdown. I'm trying to think of more though. Help me try to think of scenarios that would reverse ebay's position in the online auction world, that would also apply to bitcoin.

I see how you are getting the $2-$5 figure now. I think you have to estimate the chance of failure at way over 99% to get those numbers though. Bitcoin is so superior as a money to fiat and metal that I don't think limited usage can happen in the long term. It's all or nothing.

Alawpoker: Bitcoin in its current form is only truly anonymous if you take really extreme, technical precautions, as they do on Silk Road. An overlay network on top of bitcoin has been theorized that could be used to create a truly anonymous system.

Go on.

And how many transactions is that really that useful? How much value does that hold? If I am purchasing something online, I don't need instant payments. Cost in most transactions is negligible (sub 5%) with extra benefits (not getting scammed, having recourse, etc...)



And those things absolutely say something about how much better or worse it is. It either needs to be there, or have some way of getting there. It fails on both accounts.


[QUOTE=ALawPoker;33180789]
Oh, I thought you already mentioned that it's an advantage, I don't really know the details personally.


But I doubt you actually disagree that it's an improvement over cash/CC?

If your wife is needing detectives to track this stuff down, your marriage has issues. Instead of your CC bill, she'll see your Bitcoin transactions and ask you wtf it is. But there are advantages here, of course.

Not really, a different algorithm for distribution besides the cut in half every 4 years solves this.

I think you are missing how this would help. What this does is it makes it more profitable to mine later and less profitable to mine earlier. I could certainly explain this better (and it's certainly possible I'm wrong). It would keep a flatter value for Bitcoins over time as well. If you inflated the supply roughly at the rate of the price deflation, you would have stable prices and people finding it at similar rates.


The Bitcoin faucet is another solution, but of course was subject to massive fraud and clearly was a fail for this kind of approach. Perhaps there are better ones.


I'm not sure I see the flaw. Say EA or some game manufacturer makes some WoW-like game. The in-game currency is simply EA-coins. They set up the initial distribution to just give a single address 10 million coins initially. Then they mine a total of 90 million more coins following a similar method of mining today.

You place 9 million of those coins in the game itself, and players end up using them for buying items in the game, or even transferring them out of the games to do whatever they want with them. You bootstrap it incredibly, and even if no other merchants take them, you still have a functioning economy with them.

You have 5 million users using these coins and have them in their hands, and the economy grows quite quickly. EA keeps 1 million of them as profit for motivation to get things kicked off the ground. Simple plan.

This is possible, but there is a huge financial incentive in getting behind this, if, as many believe, that there is potential to be a 100x investment. It would be even greater if you started from scratch.

I think when you attach it to something that has a successful business model with or without the coin, it seems like low risk, other than pissing off governments. And that is a huge risk, but that risk basically comes down to anything that uses cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. So if you believe this, you limit it to a small fraction of black market transactions where cash is not sufficient. You are left with internet drug sales and kiddie porn.

ebay already has been displaced for local sales by Craigslist. Ebay also has competent management and profits. None of that applies to Bitcoin. The reason Ebay has no other major competitors is because there isn't enough profit to be made to try to go against them. But Amazon is already replacing a lot of traditional sales through being partners. Ebay will pretty much lose all real sellers and only have one-off sales and people who are too clueless to do anything else. It's already happening.

I didn't estimate it that high for failure. I think there is a very strong contingent of true believers who WANT it to succeed. And those people aren't going anywhere. They are going to be small in numbers but that can support a price floor of a fairly reasonable number. $1/coin seems entirely reasonable as a floor. $8M market cap (or whatever it would be), is incredibly easy to achieve there, especially when there are so many massive hoarders who are waiting for it to hit $100. The only way you have total failure is if something else replaces it. That's the bigger risk and far less likely IMO.

It's not really that superior to money. I can store my money in a bank. I can spend it anywhere. I can hide it so I don't get ripped off. I have services where I can type numbers into a computer and the money gets routed to another place. It's also equally as inflation proof (Bitcoin can be cloned just as often as money can be printed). These superior advantages only exist in unique scenarios you mentioned above, where there is just such rampant fraud or lack of already existing technology that a new player can easily get in there.

You are right that changing the reward system could flatten out the price somewhat over what we have seen in the past. You could certainly make an argument for or against this. I think having the price go up a lot at the beginning gets more media attention, which is good, but this is really a useless point. No matter what you do, you will fail at trying to target price levels at future times. There are too many variables. Also, the algorithm you pick would have no effect on mining profitability, as if fewer coins get mined, the supply goes down and the price goes up to make up for it. All the coins always go to a relatively small percentage of miners, and there is no way to change this without screwing up the all-important double spend solution. This seems like such a minor point I don't even want to argue it any more.

It is much more important to argue about whether an in-game bitcoin2 currency could be viable for EA. This seems to have merit on the surface, but it shares the same fatal flaws as my original examples. Their network will come under massive attack from the main bitcoin pools who don't want to see it succeed, ruining people's ability to spend the coins outside the game. This can be solved with 10mil in hardware investment by EA. Then people start laundering money through the game and the government comes down on EA to control it. Then the fact that EA is pre-mining tons of coins comes out, and everyone gets upset with it, just like they did with the first alternative iXcoin. This would be a massive fail. The currency has to be independent of the corporation to work.

I think the important point is that an alternative cryptocurrency cannot be both as good as the original bitcoin, and make profit for a corporation. The profit has to come from somewhere, and if its coming out of the currency, its worse than bitcoin and people will not choose it over bitcoin. I'll respond to your other points later....

I don't really care if the Bitcoin evangelists cry about it not being fair, they don't concern me. They can get upset all they want.

For the distribution, we still have the issue with miners getting a huge majority of it, and the price being driven to the point of being unprofitable.

In the game example, you have every single player actively mining while playing the game, which is a sizable network right there. It depends if the threat from malicious miners who want to see it fail is a concern, I certainly neglected that and forgot the religious fervor that basically exists in the Bitcoin community. Being short-sighted enough and devoted to the one true cryptocurrency without regard for finding the best one would be very likely, and I could see the Bitcoin community being this ******ed, which would be another reason to fail.

iXcoin was a great example of how to try to build an ecosystem that rewarded people who contribute rather than those who do nothing other than buy hardware.

The profit comes from it actually being better and more useful and the company doing things that actually make a better ecosystem. Bitcoin has no such organization. Hell, it doesn't have to be a corporation, it could be a non-profit foundation that uses the money to fund its goals.

It occurred to me that I agree with your overriding concern, which is that improving the distribution mechanism to get it into a lot more people's hands initially could make a currency superior to bitcoin. Unfortunately, this is incompatible with Satoshi's solution to the double spend problem, which dictates that the the coins must be distributed to those with a lot of computing power. If someone could come up with a universally better solution to the double spend problem for decentralized currency, it would probably beat bitcoin if launched within the next year or two. And this is one of the reasons bitcoin could fail. But I don't see any reason to keep stating how easy it is to make a viable alternative and start from scratch. Coming up with a better solution is extremely hard, and all the crazy smart programmers haven't been able to think of one yet. It took them two decades of thinking just to give us one working solution despite a huge financial incentive; it seems like a lot to expect two. The alternative also has to be bootstrapped in very hostile conditions relative to bitcoin. It has nothing to do with religious fervor and short-sightedness. If I own bitcoins, I will be hostile to anything that could lower its value, and there are very powerful pools that will look to protect their interests.

This EA game example is not working. You realize that even the best graphic card mining rig is becoming obsolete unless you have free electricity? And how do you envision the gamers being happy with running up their electric bills for near worthless EA game currency? They should just mine bitcoin and trade it for the EA currency like they do with Second Life Lindens. Have you seen game company model that got 500k venture captital funding? They use bitcoin, not a clone. Now that is a real business model. This EA game business model is so flawed I am furious that I cannot think of a simple way to explain in writing why it is so stupid because I am getting drunk now. It will come to me tomorrow.

This is as clear a point as I can come up with in this state: When making your alternative bitcoin protocol, if you stick with Satoshi's double spend solution, there is no way to profit from it or perform a coin redistribution away from the computing powerhouses, unless you pre-mine (mine coins prior to releasing your client), and if you pre-mine, no one will use the client, as has been demonstrated many times before. Everyone will assume that you are just trying to do a pump-and-dump and make yourself rich at everyone else's expense, and that will probably be a good assumption.

What happened to you anyway dude? You used to be a bitcoin bull right?

People will be playing games and enjoying it, so playing at a loss isn't that crazy to think about. I definitely agree with you that a solution that doesn't require specific hardware might be nearly impossible. Perhaps if you had specialized hardware for the algorithms available and sold that out of the box for a low enough cost where you had a chance to mine (with enough scale, you could make a custom chip, and sell it for a fairly reasonable price I suppose).

Pre-mining isn't that impossible, so long as no one is actually investing anything into it initially and they get it as a side effect. You pre-mine and create something that makes it instantly useful so that no one cares that you pre-mined. You also don't try to appeal to Bitcoin users, you go for the masses.

I was a Bitcoin realist, I want to see something like it succeed, was eager to try to get involved, and saw zero profit potentials. Have an overall negative view of the Bitcoin community on the whole and basically no confidence after hacking after hacking. It's a cool technology but won't be able to cross the chasm on its own. I see no path left for it to do so. I do see it existing on a limited basis for geeks to pay ugly girls to get naked and for geeks who are too scared to make friends to get drugs from to use.

One other thing, the Bitcoin distribution *didn't* go to those with computing power. It went to those who had computing power *at the time* relative to the rest of the users. Limiting the distribution initially would have limited that and had more released later. Coins that come out when it's barely profitable to mine is the ideal situation, since most miners would basically be forced to sell to cover costs, which would distribute much more evenly.

You don't see why gold (actual gold, rather than notes redeemable in gold) doesn't work well as a currency?

Here's your lunch, please pay me the gold. ?

I don't know, I generally prefer paying nothing to paying 5%.

If you don't care about instant payment and don't trust the people you're doing business with, you can spend a few % to use an escrow service. Which is probably a lot more fair and specialized in sorting disputes correctly than i.e. Paypal or your CC company.

And then I still have the option to get payment instant at no cost.

What things? Be where? Sorry if I'm missing your point but I don't follow this.

But when you do transactions in Bitcoin, there will be transaction fees if you want the same protections. But hey, if you want to play with fire to save 3%, go for it.

You realize that when you mention escrow, which basically takes away the benefits. Escrow is expensive.

Those things = ability to buy stuff with it. No one wanting it means missing a huge property of money. So it either needs to be desired, or needs some path so that it will be desired.

In the US market, the value just isn't there for the consumer. However, in other economies (that have high levels of technology usage but poor currencies), I can see it taking off. I am more likely to see something like cell phone minutes be used though, due to it being something people want and can actually use and doesn't need the bootstrapping.

Tom, you must not be aware of the laws regarding in-game currency. Your EA game idea goes against the legal guidelines given to comanies who want to use them. Being able to use them outside the game can subject the company to money transmitting regulation, which is an expensive headache if you ask facebook. They have only managed to get licensed in 15 states.
Your idea is dominated by the video game solution from Coinlab that actually got 500k venture captial funding (link).

If you think you can do better and get funding by pitching a model based on worthless pre-mined clone currency instead of bitcoin, go ahead. Your idea is only good if you can come up with something revolutionary that can't be incorporated into the current bitcoin protocol. Then you'll be rich and drive bitcoin into the dust. You should be able to at least agree that it costs a lot of money at this point to launch a bitcoin competitor that doesn't instafail, even in the examples you are coming up with.

Here's my good bitcoin business idea for poker players: The Argentinian government is inflating the peso at 25% per year. They have instituted strict capital controls including money-sniffing dogs at the border to prevent the pesos from leaving the country. So people are putting their money into assets like property and vehicles to avoid getting inflated away, causing massive bubbles in those assets. You can only exchange USD into pesos at the official exchange rate of 4.48, but you can sell USD on the black market for 5.5 pesos, a 23% markup (link). Poker players living in Argentina can convert their USD poker winnings into bitcoin and sell the bitcoins at a huge markup to pay for living expenses in Buenos Aires. There are some Argentinians on the bitcoin forums looking for ways to get their cash out. Bitcoins are even easier to move out of Argentina into a foreign account than USD cash is. I might post this in the Buenos Aires thread. This idea illustrates the potential of a decentraized digital currency that can instantly cross borders avoiding government control.

If I thought I was playing with fire I'd use escrow, or do business elsewhere.

I actually don't think I've ever been ripped off in my life, let alone once every 33 tries. So even if it had to be one thing or the other, I'd still probably take no fee and no protection.

First thing I googled: http://btcrow.com/

"Flat rate fee of 1%"

No idea if this service is good or not, but in general I don't really see why escrow would need to be expensive. What do you base that on? It doesn't really make any sense that a bank or CC company could sort out payment disputes better than an escrow service who specializes in it.

What 'benefits' do I lose from using escrow?

OK, I don't agree that this has anything to do with inherent usefulness. (Note, I'm not claiming it's more useful than cash right now.) According to this thought process, Facebook was missing a huge property of social networking back when people were using Myspace.

And risk of getting hacked... And risk of them just being some 2-bit operation? It's a joke. The escrow's are probably worse than just sending it right there. Add up the fees, subtract the cash back you get from credit cards, and you come out ahead. It's not even close.

Yes, but Facebook had a path to get ahead of Myspace. I see no such leadership or even thought process from any of the Bitcoin community.


Yeah, I figured there are legal hurdles here. All of these things work against Bitcoin for any substantial usage. Which may be fine and dandy, but it keeps it boxed into a smaller and smaller corner.


Yes, it costs a lot of money, has a lot of legal hurdles, and would take significant work. A lot of money in terms of Bitcoin investments, but a pittance in terms of real business. Obviously I am not in a position to displace this, but I'm not in a position to do a lot of other super small scale things either.

This is the kind of stuff that it will work good against and could be the major uses of it. Perhaps I am dreaming too big. Perhaps just being a currency of last resort when there are over-intrusive governments (even the US government doesn't hit this... yet).

I am not quite following the details here. People in Argentina get USD. They can't get a good price for local goods (merchants don't take USD or aren't allowed), and they need pesos to live. They get ripped off on the pesos.

So they need a way to convert USD into pesos, but not through official channels. Or they need to cash out their USD (or some other relatively stable currency) to a bank account somewhere to save, and Argentina won't have any of it. So they trade USD for Bitcoins. Bring Bitcoins into Argentina and trade those for pesos on the black market rather than the USD. Then they can get a better exchange rate?

But to do this, they need someone buying bitcoins and selling Pesos in Argentina. Is this roughly correct?

Here is the post I made in the Buenos Aires thread in EDF
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/79...l#post33196457

I'll try to explain it better. The Argentine peso inflates at 25%, so Argentinians want to hold their savings in something else, preferably foreign currency rather than cars and property, but that is illegal. And they only want to exchange their savings, not their living expenses which must be paid in pesos, the national currency. So poker players can come into the country with fat stack of USD and sell it to them at this huge markup over the official exchange rate, since poker players need some pesos to pay rent and live in the country. So poker players have this stash of USD that they sell some of every month to pay for stuff. 2p2er Soah says that you can get 25-35% markup now.

The problem here is that the USD is really hard to transport in and out since they have started using currency sniffing dogs at the border. Another problem is that poker players can only bring in 10k without declaring it, which won't let you live forever, and the Argentine government can make you convert it at the official rip off exchange rate.

The whole process works much better if you substitute bitcoins for the USD. That way poker players don't even have to leave Argentina to bring in USD, they can just wire their poker monies onto an exchange, buy bitcoins, and trade them to an Argentinian for his pesos. You might even be able to get more than 25-35% markup for them because the Argentinian should value them more since they are much easier to take out of the country and put in a foreign bank account to save.

So the Argentinians want to trade pesos and get bitcoins, and the poker players living there want to trade bitcoins and get pesos. This is a better solution to a billion dollar problem, and it will be extremely disruptive when a lot of people start using it. And currency that can instantly teleport across borders ignoring regulation will be worth a lot.

Is there strong demand for Bitcoins from everyday Argentinians? Seems like they would prefer something like USD.

A quick search for "buenos aires" on bitcointalk showed a thread with a guy selling bitcoins for pesos and getting a lot of responses. I can't read spanish well, but he was selling for 2% more than the "informal exchange rate" listed on:
http://www.ambito.com/economia/mercados/dolar.asp
which is a whopping 6 instead of the official 4.48! 35% markup FTW! Then some other guy came in the thread and seemed to imply that the action had moved to this forum here http://bitcoinz.com.ar/
Maybe someone who reads spanish can tell us wtf is going on there.

That forum is dead. The posts are all from last year and predate the currency transaction restrictions which began in November.

Hmm that sucks. The bitcointalk thread with all the replies I linked was from this year though. I rememeber seeing Argentinians post on bitcointalk to try to get money converted recently, but I can't seem to think of the right keywords to find the threads. I think you might get a lot of action if you posted that you were selling on bitcointalk. I have another bitcointalk screenname that you can use to post, because new accounts have to make tons of replies in the newbie forum before they can start threads (the forum was getting too much spam). Maybe just put a minimum transaction amount to make it worth your time and if someone wants to trade, make them wait and do your wire onto the exchange and buy the bitcoins. You could also make a listing on bitcoin-otc.com, the largest decentralized marketplace, but its kind of complex to make an account on there with the PGP verification.

The Chilean exchange Tradehill was the second largest before Dwolla screwed them and they quit operating. This indicates to me that demand is high around there, but only foreign nationals living in the country and getting wages paid in foreign currency are able to take advantage of this by selling.

Wasn't Tradehill in Chile just for regulatory reasons?

To me it seems like fees minus cash back > ~0%.

Still don't know why a CC company can sort out payment disputes better (cheaper) than an escrow service who specializes in it, if you're worried about getting burned. I'd rather have the option not to pay for this protection when I trust the party I'm doing business with (which is like the vast majority of the time if not always).

And there's also the long-term risk of holding a centralized currency. "But hey if you want to play with fire to get some frequent flyer miles."

Not sure what you're really looking for. Bitcoin isn't a centralized operation like Facebook. There are new services popping up constantly which I'd suppose require leadership within them and as a result add value/use to the currency.

I think you have the wagon before the horse if you think 'leaders within the community scheming to drive it forward' is a property of a successful currency.

Anyways, it's gone up in value 10,000% or whatever in the last few years. So even if you're right, ****, imagine the potential if someone took the lead here.

Point 1 - yes, it is greater than 0%. But it's incredibly small. CC companies can absolutely sort things out better than two-bit Bitcoin escrow services. Maybe in 25 years, things will be different. But being able to actually go to court and settle things is kind of a big deal, rather than some unaccountable anonymous site that will take your money and run a good percentage of the time, or be too incompetent to protect it and get hacked.

I'm not recommending holding a huge amount of currency either. I'm recommending holding enough to conduct day-to-day or short term expenses. The risk there is fairly insignificant. There are a ton of ways to store value besides currency.

Point 2- yes, exactly, those who have the incentive to see it do well (the early holders) or those who can actually make things better for people. Someone needs to actually build the stuff. Yes, I see lots of crappy ass services popping up that remind me of 13 year old Geocities pages from 20 years ago. Awesome work guys! I see things that look like they know what they are doing (tradehill, numerous wallets, mtgox), and they all turn out to be scams, or completely incompetent. So who is going to actually make something good?

10000% is still a dumb thing to compare when its value was basically 0. OMG UP INF%!!! It's a dumb compare. Look at market cap. It's a drop in the bucket. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble even at the current prices (might not be a bubble if it actually develops into something, but I don't see it).

Seth-

One point about the distribution, the model mentioned before- if all the coins go to super-miners, it's still not that big a deal because they are having to put in enormous amount of expenses. I would expect a near constant difficulty (that would be ideal), with just fewer coins mined early, and more later. This means that the miners don't get a free lunch and being an early adopter isn't that rewarded without that expense.

But if Bitcoin emerged as a currency that the average person uses, there's no reason to think the escrow services would be two-bit or even that courts wouldn't recognize it.

Not being widely used right now doesn't mean it lacks the underlying properties to work well.

I get that. But someone is always left holding the bag when it loses value or collapses. That's a cost of centralized currency.

lol, you can see what you want to see I guess. If Bitcoin has the properties of a winning currency, I'm sure someone will figure out how to build something that impresses you.

Whatever, I didn't mean anything more than "Bitcoin has grown anyways" by that.

It has an advantage in some areas, but it is very small, and it is so far behind in other areas, getting to "average person using it" is going to be impossible.

Now in other countries, where it's considerably better than the alternatives, it might be able to bridge that gap better. There is no advantage now for the casual user. They must acquire them (fees + time + risk) as buyers or sell them as sellers (fees + time + risk), and the price isn't even better.

It's grown because it's new. That means it has to have gone up 10000% at some point (if it is worth something and didn't exist at some point).

Some bitcoin developers had a chance to test and report on a tiny credit card sized media device this weekend in Vienna. It runs off solar power, and it will be cheap enough to give it away. This device has been kept secret for quite a while by the Russian founders, as it has been in development for 5 years, and when bitcoin came out in 2009, the company decided to make the decentralized payment solution the main feature. Although they haven't revealed the details of the marketing plan, this company has at least 10mil in funding. When companies with pockets this deep start going all in on bitcoin, it's probably smart to pay attention. The video of what it can do is on http://bitcoincard.org/. Q1 2013 launch.

I'll let someone else answer Tom's "usability" hysteria, which is mostly true, and not very relevant:

"I predict that Bitcoin will reach usability sometime around 2019. I base that prediction on earlier disruption technologies, where blogging started appearing in 1994 and reached mainstream adoption in 2004; file sharing started in 1989 over the net and Napster hit in 1999. You had streaming video 1995, mainly porn sites streaming animated gifs, what was then tip of the spear technology; Youtube was founded 2005 and just swept the floor with everyone else just because they were usable. This is not something bad; it is just an observation that it takes ten years to get a disruptive technology from inception to becoming so easy to use that it reaches mainline adoption." - Rick Falkvinge

Do you consider decentralized vs. centralized small?

Examples?

Well I guess if there are any currency issues in the Western countries in the coming decade or so Bitcoin will have a better chance.

This is true about anything.