I personally just hold a certian amount of bitcoins and buy some more when I spend them. I used bitcoins to send openBSD some money, and was able to do that while boarding the subway.
I personally am willing to risk 10 - 20% value to help establish a reasonable stability in BTC/USD exchanges. Once the exchange becomes more stable and nerdy people hold some amount of bitcoins the above problem is fixed, it's just that right now regulation and volitility are still a problem.
- Fulfill an arbitrary number of legal requirements
- Sign up for an account at a bank
- Transfer money to the bank (by doing a?)
- Wait for the check/deposit to go through (hopefully neither you nor the bank fucked something up)
- Put it in your debit/credit account (this one step is kinda-easy, I'll grant)
The last thing about "Hoping the price holds stable" is irrelevant. The recipient can convert them immediately.
A fair comparison is the act of paying with your (funded) credit card versus paying with your (funded) Bitcoin wallet. I can say from experience that the Bitcoin wallet is significantly easier in a lot of cases (and also carries less of a risk of getting skimmed or having a payment database hacked or something).
a) Typing in a credit card number + billing address.
b)
- Signing up for an account at a Bitcoin exchange.
- Transferring money to them (by doing a?)
- Waiting for them to exchange it.
- Transferring it to the recipients' wallet (this one step is kinda-easy, I'll grant)
- Hoping the price of bitcoin holds stable-ish so that my bitcoins are still worth something when the recipient converts them back.