[jbooth]

So what would you place in the "legal/useful" quadrant in the author's post?

Maybe I'm just lacking imagination but it seems that bitcoin's uses are 90% speculation and 10% illegal. What's the killer app that's actually going to make it a useful currency rather than an asset resembling a dutch tulip?

[ericb]

-> Inheritance (transactions that unlock by date)

-> flavored money (only spendable in certain ways)

-> contingent funds (if home_inspector_signs_off then pay electrical_contractor)

-> trustless escrow

-> complex securities (if dow is down but nasdaq is up pay 10% of difference)

[jbooth]

But we already have imperfect solutions for all of those, and together they make up a very minor % of all currency transactions.

Are you saying that being debatably marginally better at those corner-cases will propel it into usurping the dollar and euro? I'm having trouble reconciling these use-cases with world-changing rhetoric.

[ericb]

I made no prediction about it usurping the dollar.

I'm saying bitcoin can do things money cannot. I listed some use cases that demonstrate the kinds of things it is suited for. When the PC first came out, the life-changing uses seemed theoretical and vague, and for about the first 5 years it was mainly a more expensive substitute for a typewriter.

Uber is marginally better than cabs, but that's more than enough to cause disruption.

edit: You know what, I didn't argue about it usurping anything, but I would put this out there as a point in that direction. There are enough use-cases like what I list to get bitcoin to a critical mass of fungibility. Products supporting new valuable use cases don't usually disappear. So if bitcoin supports these use-cases, it is entirely possible that they will propel it to a scale where peer-to-peer transactions make sense because it is prevalent enough. At that point, it could become the lingua-franca of currency.