[logicallee]

I thought the sentence was clear. For example, if you strip away the mobile, network-connected, and technological aspects of a mobile phone away, you are left with nothing: there's no centuries-old parallel for such a communications device. With bitcoin, apparently there is.

[salient]

Messages by carrier pigeon? Sounds pretty "mobile" to me.

I think the point is Bitcoin is revolutionary in many ways than just being a digital currency. It's also P2P, and these type of technologies seem very hard to shut down by governments, after reaching critical mass. There are probably a lot of things governments could do to slow it down, but I'm not sure they could kill it.

[jowiar]

But the problem is that, among all the things Bitcoin is trying to be, one of them is a currency. A pseudonymous decentralized p2p payment system is a reasonable idea, but since every transaction takes place in a currency with bad fundamentals as a currency, it's not a particularly good implementation of that idea.

[foley]

I see the term critical mass being used a lot within the Bitcoin community. What's your opinion on what would constitute critical mass?