[glesica]

I agree that un-bundling the escrow from the rest of the stack would be a good thing. However, I think it is important to keep in mind that replacing credit cards with something less effective (for whatever definition of "effective" matters) than credit cards isn't a true replacement.

The way I am thinking about it is sort of like those threads on HN where someone says "You can create a Dropbox clone in N lines of X and an external hard drive". That's NOT a Dropbox "clone", but rather something that could be used to replace Dropbox for some people some of the time. It would take much, much more to replace Dropbox, and maybe someone will get it right someday. Same goes for Bitcoin, it's fine to think of alternative financial networks (awesome, in fact, I hate banks!) but it's important not to get ahead of ourselves.

[Sambdala]

I would argue in this case that Bitcoin is likely to be more effective in a huge number of cases, not less effective.

I agree with the first part of your second paragraph, but I don't necessarily think it's going to apply here for any places where we see Bitcoin in wide deployment.

[glesica]

I disagree, because I don't think Bitcoin is a very good currency, and even if it had the potential to be a good currency at some point in the past, that potential has been destroyed by speculative hoarding and a mining arms race. The linked-to article makes clear that it isn't necessarily "Bitcoin" that is promising, but the end-run around the financial services industry that it is trail-blazing for everyone else. I agree with this sentiment, and really I had never considered it the way he stated it. However, if you see Bitcoin itself, as a currency, differently, then it makes sense we would disagree on its worth as a replacement for credit cards.