Quote:
Originally Posted by $_$
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...
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A lot of what you said can be attributed to simply not knowing the options. That is because it is literally brand new.
When you installed web browsers back in the Windows 95 days, you didn't know what you were getting. Was Netscape good? Probably, a lot of people use it. But who knows for sure? And what about those browsers that came on floppy disks with magazines? Those were filled with adware... You wouldn't have known either way, because Netscape hadn't built up a reputation yet
The remittance example isn't the best "this is what you can do today" but more of "this is what it will be like when bitcoin is more adopted, but can still be done today perfectly easy as a proof of concept". Yes you can send $100 to anyone in the world instantly for basically free, but they have to find somewhere to spend that. Right now it means selling it for cash, but hopefully in the future that will change. Right now it's a bit of a pain to buy with bitcoin.. Just like it was a pain to send email and browse the web when they were brand new. I try to spend with bitcoin as much as I can. When I buy something with it, I simply deposit the same amount to my local exchange, and buy some BTC at the current rate. Others can do this too, once you have an exchange set up, or you can go to the bitcoin atm.
The most beneficial people to this will be emerging economies. Everyone here in Canada loves their Fiat, which is backed by a strong government and economy. That's all well and good, but how about you open your eyes a bit and think of the rest of the world? There aren't many countries that are like Canada. Look at all of Africa for instance. What happens to their fiat when the government decides to just keep printing billions and billions of dollars? You get inflation at a rate of 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe)
These are the people who need bitcoin more than anything. They can't count on their shitty governments. People think fiat has intrinsic value for some reason.. well the intrinsic value of these currencies is basically the paper you are holding in your hand. Maybe it's good for starting fires or using as TP.
Outside africa you have these european countries falling apart. Cyprus was screwed over so bad by banking russian mobsters that they had to literally take money from their peoples' bank accounts. Ukraine will be another good example, along with countries run by shitty governments in South America.
So yeah, things are all peachy in Canada, but there is more to the world than you and the people in your country. For once, the PEOPLE will have their own currency, instead of counting on basically faith.
As for wallets, it's not that hard to just ask your local bitcoin geek for suggestions. If you are dealing with bitcoin in smallish amounts (under a few thousand USD) then I would say use
blockchain. They are leading the industry in technology and trust. Otherwise I wouldn't trust putting my money somewhere that isn't backed up by insurance. That would be just dumb. Luckily, you don't have to do that (and the people who lost their money on sketchy services should have known this, the info is out there).
For larger amounts I would use
multibit, and keep a backup of the encrypted data on as many backups as you find convenient. Dropbox, google, usb sticks, hard drives, etc. Also if you have Android you can use
bitcoin wallet for buying and selling things on the go.. keep a couple hundred in there for going to restaurants, etc. Blockchain has an app as well that you can use with your account. Apple bans anything to do with bitcoin (which in itself is sketchy as all fuck) but there is a solution in the works using html5 so it will be browser based, and there is nothing they can do to ban it.
If you are storing savings, I would recommend
cold storage (printed on paper, or on an offline device, and stored somewhere safe).
None of these can be stolen by anyone without your private key, or lost by a poorly run company. Unless you physically give it to someone and tell them your key, it's safer than anything.