I do believe that the bitcoin payment network adds a great deal of value. As for the price of bitcoin, it is still mostly driven by speculation.
As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with credit cards or paypal.
I'm not sure it's such a great network, when you look at the ability of one service (SatoshiDice) to effectively overload it to the point some people started leaving their transactions out of their blockchain calculations.
As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.
--edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.
As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.
The flip side is higher price charged by merchants due to higher processing fees. Not to mention that paypal will close down your accounts whenever they feel that you are too suspicious.
Of course, with bitcoin, merchants will charge lower fees since they no longer have to worry about chargebacks. Nobody also can't prevent you from spending bitcoin as you like(as long it's your personal wallet).
As I said, I actually like these features of paypal and CCs, even if prices are slightly higher as a result. I definitely agree that competition in this space would be good, but I don't think throwing out consumer-friendly features is the answer.
To me, "no longer have to worry about chargebacks" is the same thing as "can take your money and run, and there's nothing you can do about it".
Credit cards are a completely different model. When you hand someone your CC, you say, "please take exactly the amount of money I'd like you to and no more. Oh, and don't take any money out in the future, either." Only stolen bitcoins have this problem.
Not really. You're saying "I authorise exactly this amount of money and no more", and if they then take any more or don't deliver the service it's fraud, and you're protected from that by consumer credit law (at least you are here in the UK).
Raw bit-coins can't do fast transactions without risking double spends. Which limits you to a ~20 min checkout process or using 3rd party services then you deal with whatever their rules are.
You also can't "instantly" transact with Bitcoin, unless you're willing to risk a double-spend. You have to wait for confirmations through the blockchain which involve fees AND waiting (or really really long waiting) -- if you're going to pay a fee, why not just use the CC network and get it done instantly? At least when you get an auth from the CC network, you know you're guaranteed the money. When a transaction completes on the blockchain, it's still up in the air until the next block is produced by enough people.
> As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with credit cards or paypal.
How about being able to transact with 99% of your customer base in a reliable, fraud-proof manner?
If the price drops, you use that as clear evidence that your models are correct. If the price rises, well then that's clearly just temporary market irrationality, and it will eventually drop again.
So far it seems to work that way, yes. And no, not because there's no way a prediction of that sort can fail. Slow, steady gains and a long plateau would disprove me. But this doesn't happen because BTC basically seems to suffer from massive hype cycles.
