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Comment by ubersync | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin, once more popular and stable, will make it hard for these regressive plans to be implemented.

Will it ever be more popular? EU is recently thinking about banning crypto currencies. This might end with ID verification requirement for all exchanges. Then Visa and other CC issuers will ban anything related to BitCoin, just like PayPal did and whole market will be dead.

Bitcoin commerce is surprisingly resilient. Sites like LocalBitcoins facilitate in person cash trades.

As long as you can barter things of value, like a brand new Macbook for bitcoins, bitcoin will survive.

> Sites like LocalBitcoins facilitate in person cash trades.

Sites like LocalBitcoins would very quickly cease to exist if there is a concerted government effort to ban Bitcoins.

Or move to anonymous networks or more relaxed jurisdictions. Usually countries fail to unite on this kind of topics, I'm pretty sure jurisdictions like Hong Kong will allow always cryptocurrency trading sites.

Or will Bitcoin be like the year of the linux desktop where it's always a year away?

I personally don't see much sense for cryptocurrencies to replace credit card or some other payment methods. Instead bitcoin can become the enabler of international trade, and maybe base for other innovations.

In the same sense as linux never became popular desktop OS, but it has gained new market share from elsewhere.

Why is Bitcoin any different to cash in this case? Companies who will already store your Bitcoins for a small fee exist (and are probably safer for most people than self-storage).

There are plenty of asset classes that already provide a notional alternative to negative interest reserve balances, and making those [even] more fungible and consumer friendly is a far more realistic option than making BTC less unstable.

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