If you and your whole family live in the U.S. and you have a couple credit cards, a debit card, and a bank account, Bitcoin is going to seem pretty useless. For you, the US dollar does just fine.
But the rest of the world isn't like the U.S. I visited Latvia recently, and my bank refused to let me withdraw money. Florida is full of Cuban Americans who want to send money to Cuba. Many people are imprisoned. The world is full of borders that make moving money difficult.
Bitcoin's market cap is moving towards where it needs to be to float all of those transactions. Even if no one uses it to store value, and no one uses it to buy groceries, it is still immensely valuable just as a means to move value from one location to another. Even if no one holds Bitcoin for more than two weeks, it will still have a market cap far north of a billion dollars.
I'm cautious about your Latvia story - its sounds to me like the bike was worried about fraud. Thats pretty common - about half the times I go to the US, I have to ring up the bank and get the card unblocked.
That being said, there are countries attempting to control the flow of money. Argentina wants to enforce its price for the dollar. Cyprus wants to prevent everyone taking their money and running. and so on. However, most of these countries see attempts to circumvent their controls as illegal. I feel its unwise to get my hopes up about bitcoin for this sort of transaction for that reason.
Comments
If you and your whole family live in the U.S. and you have a couple credit cards, a debit card, and a bank account, Bitcoin is going to seem pretty useless. For you, the US dollar does just fine.
But the rest of the world isn't like the U.S. I visited Latvia recently, and my bank refused to let me withdraw money. Florida is full of Cuban Americans who want to send money to Cuba. Many people are imprisoned. The world is full of borders that make moving money difficult.
Bitcoin's market cap is moving towards where it needs to be to float all of those transactions. Even if no one uses it to store value, and no one uses it to buy groceries, it is still immensely valuable just as a means to move value from one location to another. Even if no one holds Bitcoin for more than two weeks, it will still have a market cap far north of a billion dollars.
I'm cautious about your Latvia story - its sounds to me like the bike was worried about fraud. Thats pretty common - about half the times I go to the US, I have to ring up the bank and get the card unblocked.
That being said, there are countries attempting to control the flow of money. Argentina wants to enforce its price for the dollar. Cyprus wants to prevent everyone taking their money and running. and so on. However, most of these countries see attempts to circumvent their controls as illegal. I feel its unwise to get my hopes up about bitcoin for this sort of transaction for that reason.