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Comment by rrrrtttt | Hacker News Reader

Neither. It's not a currency because you can't use it to buy products and services (other than drugs and socks). It's not a commodity because it's not a raw material or agricultural product.

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I somewhat agree, I see bitcoins more in the vein of contracts that have market value, like futures and options. The value of these has value based on their underlying stocks and commodities, but that's as far as they go, value wise. Bitcoins, whose value are purely determined by their associated majority holder's currency (US Dollars) are very similar.

Yeah, Bitcoins can only be spent on drugs and socks. Totally, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

Just FYI, there are 1298 merchants on that page :)

You can trade sexual favors for all kinds of stuff, but it doesn't make it currency.

It looks like most of those "accept Bitcoin" by using a service like Bitpay. In other words, they accept only fiat currencies but allow you to send them payments through another service that will exchange Bitcoin for some fiat currency.

BitPay doesn't coun't. The merchants are all accepting whatever currency BitPay converts into.

I'll sell you my car for a sack of turds, assuming someone will exchange it for $15K and hand me the cash first.

Well, using Bitcoin as a means of transferring USD is a perfectly legitimate use. It even has lower fees than credit cards and Paypal these days, exchange fees included.

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