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Originally Posted by Drizzt Do'Urden

If you're really marking ease of use and transparency as the indicator of currency success, nothing is easier or more transparent than Bitcoin. If you wanted to send a friend in Thailand $100 today, you would have to go to Western Union or some other remittance service, purchase $100 USD, send it to the remittance service in Thailand and your friend would have to trek all the way there to receive it. On top of that, Western Union will eat a big chunk of that $100. With Bitcoin, it's as easy as getting their Bitcoin address and sending the Bitcoin from my wallet to theirs. As for transparency, that's one of the biggest values behind Bitcoin -- there is no under the table type spending. There's a general ledger that is viewable and analyzable by anyone, anywhere, anytime. There's a website that makes all this information easily accessible as well: www.blockchain.info

I think that's oversimplifying it a little bit, don't you think? If I wanted to send my friend some money, first I'd have to find a place/website that I trusted enough to create a wallet and deposit my money. Like others have mentioned, with Gox going down in the fashion it did, it really does make people (especially people that is not as in-tune with everything that's going on) wary of whom to trust with their money. I tried signing up for the largest Chinese bitcoin exchange the other day so that I can deposit some money and they required a ridiculous amount of personal information and identification documentation, not to mention the time that it would take in order for the application to process. The process alone turned me away from the whole thing. Does other exchanges require information from you in this fashion? On top of that, after I finished depositing that money, transfer it to him, buddy will need to convert it to fiat again in order to use it unless he's gonna use it on something obscure. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure these exchanges charge you money for conversion and probably withdrawl of your money too, albeit probably lesser than western union. But my point is in it's current state the argument that sending money using BTC is somehow more convenient or faster than transferring money in a more traditional way isn't a good argument.... Buddy in Thailand might have to trek to western union but he's got cash on hand, ready to use. But if he has bitcoins, he's got to to convert, wait for convert, go to ATM and then withdrawl his fiat...