[Tichy]

Maybe a useful service would look like this: send BTC to any address, pay by credit card. That way shops could go BitCoin only, and people who don't want to bother setting up a bitcoin wallet could simply use that service to pay by credit card.

[netcan]

The question then becomes 'why would/ what would make merchants want this?'

If merchants are using btc themselves, it becomes trivial for people to want to use btc to trade with them. Are there any non shady reasons for preferring btc though? Why would you want to accept a volatile new currency when all your expenses are in a different currency?

The more I think about it the more I think that btc will need to bootstrap from some sort of tangent: goofy investment medium, payment processing technology, gray markets...

Might become the currency of the underworld.

[Tichy]

For example because you could accept BitCoin right now. No hassles with trying to get some payment provider to accept you as a legitimate business. Fees might be lower, too.

[netcan]

I could if I wanted bitcoin and if my customers had bitcoin. Realistically though it's going to amount to my customers buying bitcoin to pay me and then me converting immediately back into hard currency. So, we'd both pick up some fees along the way. Prices would nominally be set in some other currency, probably the same currency as my expenses.

That's not really a currency. It's a payment processing service.

I guess it has to go through this sort of thing while its small.