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Comment by DTanner | Hacker News Reader

> Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it.

Hopefully in a few years time when it's matured, Bitcoin will be that alternative.

Bitcoin? No way. We might as well use Facebook credits. Getting Aunt Martha to trust some sketchy form of 'money' to make an online payment is going to be exceptionally difficult. Imagine suing for damages in bitcoins -- it's not a legal currency anywhere. It's a digital version of trading goats.

I can buy and sell goats well enough....

We actually have a couple of goats we'd like to sell, but are having trouble finding a buyer.

Goats-as-currency have very poor liquidity, fungibility, and divisibility.

Bah. Baaaah.

"Getting Aunt Martha to trust some sketchy form of 'money' to make an online payment is going to be exceptionally difficult."

Really? Then how did Aunt Martha ever get to trust some sketchy online auction site called "ebay"?

Tens/hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing?

In order to be a real alternative to PayPal, Bitcoin will have to avoid the problems that digital gold currencies had, since it's far more similar to them than to PayPal. What were those problems? Accounts differ.

The digital gold currencies had exactly one problem: they worked like cash, but without the necessary decentralization and untraceability. So, people started using them like cash, including for illicit purposes, but the services remained subject to centralized shutdown and seizure.

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