When businesses actually price products or services in a digital currency as opposed to accepting it, we'll know it has arrived and is ready to rival national currencies.
Then you will miss the moment when "Bitcoin has arrived".
You see, if anything the last 5 years has taught us, is that Bitcoin's adoption can continue to dramatically increase despite wild volatility. (Data point: Bitpay signed up 10,000 merchants through a period when 1 BTC was sometimes losing 50% of its value intra-day!)
Volatility is unfortunate, that's for sure, and it is expected to decline over time as trading volume increases. But if you want to measure Bitcoin's success/adoption, look at actual adoption, instead of volatility.
Then you will miss Bitcoin's success as payment processing, as a remittance (replacing Western Union, MoneyGram...), etc. Bitcoin is used more than just as a currency. Restricting your view to only its use as a currency is not seeing Bitcoin's success in these other areas.
It almost goes without saying that such a transition would require the price of Bitcoin relative to a basket of other currencies to remain more stable by a couple orders of magnitude than it does today.
Totally agreed -- they pretend to support the platform for the hipster cred & expanded market, but I'm sure the corporate policy is "Bitcoin arrives. Bitcoin is immediately placed on exchange".
I'd be surprised if corporations would gamble so dangerously by keeping a Bitcoin store. As long as they price against USD and convert immediately, they can only suffer limited losses from price swings.
They don't suffer any losses from price swings. Pretty much everyone uses a third party payment processor that guarantees that when the retailer charges a bitcoin customer $100 they get $100 less fees directly into their bank account.
ahaha thanks bud!! it's been exhausting because they have so many buzzwords designed to handle counter-arguments, so many people with money invested, and well -- the fact is people are willing to pay for them. What I've been learning is that people will radically alter their lifestyle/views/demeanor when presented with the possibility for a cashout. They kinda get tunnelvision. Plus, there happen to some idealistic tech people who wouldn't mind suffering a minor loss just to see a cool idea work, so they'll keep playing with it even if they lose a couple hundred bucks here and there. It makes for some intense momentum...
Hopefully you will see me posting much less about this and much more about music signal processing + machine learning apps I'm working on :P
Looking through your comments... maybe you want to join me on some anti-Bitcoin venture? I'm thinking of compiling a site providing a detailed argument of why it makes no sense just so that I don't have to keep wasting my breath lol. But I mean the truth is a lot of these arguments are freely available (especially if you check the manifestos written up by some of Bitcoin's competitors or qualified economists). I just feel bad that naive people think it's some sort of tech "investment" and if you don't write negative stuff on the threads their first comment is "Where do I get some?". I bet this is how all pyramid schemers feel at first. Like you're investing in a company, it's just that the company doesn't make anything or do anything... Then Bitcoiners try to say that the worth is in the "ingenuity of the process" or something but then its like... THIS IS AN OPEN SOURCE CRYPTO GAME FOR F__K'S SAKE
The point is... Bitcoin is an international hoax and I get bored at work! I also tend to think that HN is turning into watered-down pseudo tech and Bitcoin is the epitome of that. All these "crypto-miners" who just execute pre-compiled code or whatever... yeesh.
Fantasy adds romanticism to peoples lives, but this one will cause too many ruined fortunes.
(Side note: It seems you & I are always arguing with the same guys, lolololol.... some of these handles are all too familiar)
I don't see pricing as significant goal with Bitcoin. Other currencies can be used for pricing. I use bitcoin myself, and never by from stores which price the goods in Bitcoin, because they are most certainly rip-off prices. The good way is to price in fiat, then use something like bitpay exchange rate at checkout.
There are a lot of countries in the world that have their own currencies but price goods and services in EUR or USD. I know in Romania things are priced in EUR from cell phone top-ups to real estate.
That's a sign of a failing currency that no-one wants to use though, it's a bad signal when people really want to transact in something else but are forced to use a currency.
You see, if anything the last 5 years has taught us, is that Bitcoin's adoption can continue to dramatically increase despite wild volatility. (Data point: Bitpay signed up 10,000 merchants through a period when 1 BTC was sometimes losing 50% of its value intra-day!)
Volatility is unfortunate, that's for sure, and it is expected to decline over time as trading volume increases. But if you want to measure Bitcoin's success/adoption, look at actual adoption, instead of volatility.