[kiba]

Silk Road is famous, but it doesn't mean that illegal activities are the main economic activities in bitcoin.

The number of accounts is currently at about 22000, and the largest number of people online at any given time is 126 – a stable community, but much smaller than those who see Silk Road as being the single shadowy force keeping up the Bitcoin economy behind the scenes imagine. -- http://bitcoinmagazine.net/the-silk-road-report/

[rbn]

The problem is that CCs and PayPal is much easier to use and it is much safer than Bitcoins.

So I for one see no reason to use bitcoin to purchase anything other than products that can only be purchased via bitcoins

[kiba]

The problem is that CCs and PayPal is much easier to use and it is much safer than Bitcoins.

If you never use bitcoin, you wouldn't realize how convenient it is in some situation. For example, when I brought an album, I just sent some coins to the address and then it was a done deal. I don't have to enter my credit card information or enter my username/password.

If you aren't convinced about bitcoin but you have time, you should experiment and find if there's any usecases for bitcoin rather than just dismissing it outright.

Let also note that the security pressure by criminals have lead lot of bitcoin sites to adopt 2 factor authentication. Some figured out that they don't need their wallet online at all and can get away with just using the blockchain to process payment. This meant even if the server were to get hacked, there's no bitcoin to steal. The bitcoin team themsleves are also working on adding multi-signature transactions.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Also, I'd argue that BitCoin is very simple to use. Put in an address, type in the amount of money, and wait. Sure, transactions can take a while, but it's not very complex.

[ktizo]

Given the amount of people who are victims of scams and frauds within the mainstream banking system, and the habit of paypal to freeze people's accounts and hold their money on a frighteningly regular basis, I am not sure that bitcoin is any worse from a safety point of view.

[rbn]

Of course paypal account feezes and scams do occur on paypal and traditional banking systems. However what is the percentage?

Every few months a bitcoin site gets lots of attention and boom they get hacked. Usually it is because the site is run by a teen or a college student wanting to make a quick a buck.

[jerguismi]

Hmm, I guess those statistics are from the SR forums, a separate site. The actual SR web site doesn't give out such statistics. You could perhaps estimate the usage by listings & reviews.