tokens. [1]

[1]-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cba2GA3haYM&feature=youtu.be

Fold let's you buy from common stores like Starbucks with bitcoin. I haven't actually used it, but I hear it's good.

You should check out NEO.

Shapeshift to Monero before or after! Doesn't really matter.

Try buying cocaine from your local neighborhood cartel, contrast that to receiving shipments in the mail. World of difference as far as safety/security.

The difference is that it is likely that a majority of Bitcoin transactions for goods and services are for drugs, ransoms, and other illegal purposes because it is wildly inefficient to use as a payment system for legitimate transactions, due to high transaction fees, long confirmation times, and low merchant acceptance. The vast majority of transactions in US dollars, on the other hand, are legitimate.

How are you going to anonymously trade gold online? Bitcoin gives the anonymity that criminals need.

> I am geniuenly interested in seeing why Bitcoin should fail as being a store of value.

Oh, it's a great store of value. But that doesn't make it a good currency. Currencies aren't intended to store value, they're intended to facilitate the transfer of value. Assets (be it physical such as property, governmental such as bonds, or corporate such as stocks) are what is intended to store value.

In general, you want a currency to suffer from inflation and decrease in value over time. While this may seem counter-intuitive to having a healthy currency, it's the best thing for the economy, as it encourages the currency to continually be in circulation, and whatever cannot be readily spent to be invested into assets or placed into a bank, which then goes and loans it out to others who need it, stimulating the economy.

Gold has never been easy to use as currency. It needs to be weighed, and now its value is so high that in order to buy everyday items, you'd be dealing in almost immeasurably small slivers of gold. So instead people used it as an asset; They would buy it speculatively and watch the price rise as scarcity increased. As more people bought it, the scarcity increased even more quickly, leading to effectively a deflationary spiral.

What do you think will happen as we get closer to the 21 million Bitcoin limit? It'll be the same deal. Everyone will hold onto their BTC because it's scarce, and increased scarcity increases value, and before long, the entire BTC economy grinds to a halt.

"But this has never happened with gold!" I hear you say. Let me point you to the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, where the government basically said "Naw, dawgs, give us that gold back. We gotta get this economy moving again.", and made most private possession of gold illegal, in order to help get America out of the great depression.

Bitcoin is an amazingly cool concept. Bitcoin is an awesome work of technology. Bitcoin is not a currency.