If my credit card is stolen or even used in a strange manner I get a phonecall and a hold put on my account. How many people have recovered money from their stolen Bitcoin wallets?
In some countries, this is as high as 20%.
Are your savings earning more than 4% a year, wherever they're invested in? If not, it's losing money, and if it is, subtract 4% from it and that's your "real" interest.
What do you think is going to happen once a bunch of countries with really crappy currency systems get wind of Bitcoin in any meaningful way? Do you think the value might rise? :)
Just imagine back in the early days of the Internet when someone said, “I’ll shop at the brick and mortar store down the street any day of the week over an online store thank you very much.” It was a legitimate concern back then but we moved past it to the point that it sounds ridiculous today. Just wait :)
On traditional banking, It also depends on where you live. I doubt people in Cyprus, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and a couple other places feel that safe with their life savings in banks post 2007. I know JPM recently put capital controls on transfers greater than 50k outgoing from the US (but accepting incoming), I wonder what that is all about.
In most countries in the world local currencies are unstable and subject to the whim of politicans (would you keep your life savings in argentinian pesos? Neither would Argentinians!), there are no easy ways to accept online payments, there are no easy ways to transfer money to/from abroad etcetera. I would argue that adopting Bitcoin is an immediate quality of life improvement for a big portion of the world population, moreso when/if it value stabilizes.
For the record, BIP 0038 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0038 was released just a few days ago (although it was a working draft for a while). You can, right now, create a BIP38 encrypted paper wallet (finally!) over at bitaddress.org which means that someone with access to your paper wallet can't just sweep it unless they know the key, and the key uses scrypt so it's quite resistant to brute forcing.
I recently moved most of my btc savings into this type of paper (or in my case, pdf) wallet and entrusted the key (broken into pieces of course) to trusted people. Much better peace of mind. I set the public addresses as "Watch Only" on blockchain.info/wallet so even if blockchain is hacked, nobody can get to those wallets, they are effectively airgapped, and I can monitor any activity on them from anywhere.
This usually comes from them being vulnerable to an actor who you believe will wield force on your behalf if they break contract. This then means you're stuck trying to find an actor who
1. you trust to wield force on your behalf (i.e. they're not just some cutout established by your counterparty)
2. who you are sure has means to wield the force against the counterparty (perhaps they can prove that they know where the counterparty lives)
Those are difficult criteria to fill, which is among the reasons why over a long period of time, we've invented governments we can put up with.
I can imagine two other scenarios where you might be able to generate the level of trust you want:
1. If the counterparty can somehow prove that it's not in their short-term interest (because sometimes people run successful and profitable services for years and then abscond with the money suddenly) to just take all your money and run.
2. If you have insurance with an insurer that you are sure could pay you if everyone transacting with that counterparty made a claim at once. (But then, how can you trust that insurer unless they are vulnerable to someone you can trust to wield force against them on your behalf if they break contract?)
I think any future where bitcoin organisations are as trusted as banks is a future where they are registered with the government as financial bodies and regulated in such fashion.
Bernanke stated at the FOMC Press Conference in March that such a haircut was possible.
Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.
"...An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities...the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution."
===> Sounds like what happened in Cyprus. They got stock in return for the haircut. No exception is indicated for "insured deposits" in the U.S.
Bloomberg: "...Bank of America’s holding company...held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June..."
===> I don't know where you get your news, but I'm willing to bet that the sources you trust are not going to be talking about this until your haircut is complete. And when they do, they will probably blame it on "deregulation."
People only need to know your credit card number, name, and expiration date to use your credit card to purchase something online. Since you give those information to many merchants, it is very easy for those info to leak out.
For someone to use your bitcoin to purchase something, they have to have your private key. When you make a purchase, you do not give out your private key to anyone. bitcoin and credit card are two very different things.
Credit card was not designed for internet, while bitcoin is.