I'm not sure it's such a great network, when you look at the ability of one service (SatoshiDice) to effectively overload it to the point some people started leaving their transactions out of their blockchain calculations.

As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.

--edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.

> As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with credit cards or paypal.

How about being able to transact with 99% of your customer base in a reliable, fraud-proof manner?

You also can't "instantly" transact with Bitcoin, unless you're willing to risk a double-spend. You have to wait for confirmations through the blockchain which involve fees AND waiting (or really really long waiting) -- if you're going to pay a fee, why not just use the CC network and get it done instantly? At least when you get an auth from the CC network, you know you're guaranteed the money. When a transaction completes on the blockchain, it's still up in the air until the next block is produced by enough people.

So far it seems to work that way, yes. And no, not because there's no way a prediction of that sort can fail. Slow, steady gains and a long plateau would disprove me. But this doesn't happen because BTC basically seems to suffer from massive hype cycles.