[ufmace]

It's easy to do Bitcoin transactions, true. Everything else you might want to do with money is what's hard. Like:

* Move all of the payments you've received into a normal bank account to pay operating costs

* Allow a number of employees to do the above for continuity planning

* Remove such ability from employees who have left the company

* Ensure that the coins are not lost due to any unexpected hardware failure

* Ensure that the coins can't easily be stolen by a hacker

* Ensure that a malicious business owner or employee can't take all of the coins and disappear one day

* Ensure that any handling mistakes with Bitcoin keys don't accidentally render the coins unretrievable

[goldcd]

I would agree with most of that - not insurmountable, but all stuff that needs to be considered.

History of money is fascinating (from direct trades, to intermediates like gold, to notes, to cash, to banks, to cheques, to online etc etc) and throughout this evolution we've built in all manner of safeguards - clawback on your credit card if vendor won't refund, to having your government underwrite your bank. Your money is pretty safe.

Bitcoin strikes me as the equivalent of 'gold' right back at the beginning of financial evolution, that has tacked on the futuristic ability to beam it across the planet. Solves a load of problems, but will never solve some I must have a solution for.

I'm still a fan and still think it's the most interesting and unforeseen thing I think the internet has given us.

[ufmace]

Mostly agreed. I think it's an interesting technology with a lot of potential. We're still learning a lot. One of the things we've learned is that people seem to like the way that the conventional banking system has a lot of people in the loop to fix mistakes and reverse fraud. Yes, they're also imperfect and sometimes make their own mistakes, but it seems to be better on the whole than the digital crypto systems where simple rules are strictly applied, and no appeals or exceptions are possible.