"the ultimate aim is to turn bitcoin into something that anyone can use to more easily store, send, and receive money"
Please, tell how you do that with a currency whose value fluctuates so wildly. The problem with bitcoin, to put it simply, is that as soon as people start using it, its value soars, making it unusable again. That's why it will never work in its current form.
This is what I have never understood about Bitcoin and its advocates (who I guess are just fanboys or early adopters holding bitcoins). I mean it's just like shares. Also, it's very skewed. Whoever got in first has got a lot of it with your chance of getting it at later stages not equal, actually extremely unlikely. And no sir, no, it's not the same case with "money" as we use it today. Bitcoin is broken in this sense if we talk of it from a traditional mean of currency point of view. It's just a glorified fad for geeks, fans, and early adopters.
What's your alternative distribution model? How do you propose to bootstrap an independent value store unattached to existing national currencies? It seems that bitcoin mirrors that quote about democracy in that way, "the worst form except the others that have been tried."
Please, tell how you do that with a currency whose value fluctuates so wildly. The problem with bitcoin, to put it simply, is that as soon as people start using it, its value soars, making it unusable again. That's why it will never work in its current form.