Imagine prices in shop given as 0.000132 BTC, 0.000123 BTC, 0.0000132 BTC or even worst 0.0009999, 0.000999, 0.009999 - looks similar and it is easy to be mislead and pay for something much more then expected. People would need to get use to count zeros after decimal point. This hardly matters with any real currency.
Far more important limitations:
Built in deflation - that it is seen as a one-way bet with ever-increasing value and an ever more limited supply would cause problems if used as a currency (though not obviously as a store of value). The problem for it as a store of value is that the value is entirely predicated on it being a successful currency.
Volatility - if prices change rapidly, that would make use in retail almost impossible, and as a store of value dangerous. Many of the places which say they take Bitcoin right now simply move the money immediately to another currency to avoid this issue - that's not going to work if it is actually used as a currency and to store value long-term. Imagine it replacing the USD for example and remaining volatile...
Time to process transactions - takings minutes to verify a transaction is not going to work -it'd need to be on the order of seconds, and for a digital currency it really should be as fast as the network.
Lack of regulation - again retailers/consumers should be nervous if their financial institutions have no regulations or guarantees that the money they say they hold actually exists at all. Some exchanges have reported a massive theft and walked away with no liability, others impose arbitrary limits on withdrawals etc - this really is wild-west finance and in a crash or bubble you can expect extreme fraud to go on undetected because there are no independent auditors, regulations or laws which govern these activities.
Lack of ties to identity - without verified accounts it's far too easy to commit fraud or theft - very like paper money which everyone is moving away from.
Lack of reversibility - it doesn't let you roll back transactions, though one could work around this by keeping a ledger and rolling the ledger positions back by transferring coins back and forth. If you're going to do that though and trust the bank/exchange to regulate transactions, why bother with the cryptocurrency bit at all?
Lack of transparency in the management process - who decides on the rules of the game here? If the official clients suddenly change rules in concert - existing bitcoin holders would have to just go along with this if the majority voted with it - when large amounts of money are involved, this sort of thing becomes very important. e.g. we hit the existing 21m limit, and those controlling the software decide to up the limit to 30m - suddenly lots of assumptions about value would be questioned. I'd be very nervous about the lack of regulated control.
Lack of backing by a government, corporation or trading bloc - when the market attacks government currencies, governments are able to expend extreme resources to mitigate outright panic and collapse. When the market sharks get interested in Bitcoin and attack it in the same way as they attack say the Euro, there will be no such backup, just a freely floating rate which is open to manipulation and depends entirely on public confidence.
I do think it has some interesting properties and is a useful experiment, but have extreme reservations about this being the actual digital currency which makes it into use as a global exchange mechanism.
"Lack of transparency in the management process" the official client is open source, any changes would have to be agreed by the development team but they would only come into effect if all miners (or at least 51%) agreed to the change.
It seems your points show you dont really understand what bitcoin is. Requiring it to be backed by a corportation or a government is exactly the oppositte of what bitcoin set out to be.
You should read more on it before making suggestions such as these.
What does relatively safely mean? I'd prefer transactions to be guaranteed and accounts to have a verifiable amount of funds in them - the currencies/banks we have now do this in seconds for small transactions.
the official client is open source, any changes would have to be agreed by the development team but they would only come into effect if all miners (or at least 51%) agreed to the change.
There's definitely space for conflict there. If the official client and/or lots of the miners decide something, it's going to be hard to get momentum in another direction, and as a small holder you will have no say at all. Given the huge vested interest of developers and miners, that seems ripe for abuse.
It seems your points show you dont really understand what bitcoin is.
If that's the case, it should be easy to rebut them. That you have replied with non-rebuttal rebuttals on two points and snide remarks for the rest doesn't give me much confidence.
I also find the deflation built into Bitcoin worrying, esp. accompanied by the unquestioning cheerleading from many proponents of it.
I had a look at your website, and it looked really interesting - http://evr.gr/.
Aren't those two just a layer on top of bitcoin?
1 mBTC = 0.001 BTC
1 mBTC = 100,000 Satoshis
1 uBTC = 0.000001 BTC
1 μBTC = 100 Satoshis
1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC
100 Satoshis = 0.000001 BTC
1,000 Satoshis = 0.00001 BTC
10,000 Satoshis = 0.0001 BTC
1 BTC = 100,000,000 Satoshis
1 BTC = 100,000 μBTC
1 BTC = 1000 mBTC
So 0.000132 BTC would be labelled in a shop as 0.132 mBTC
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=14438.msg195287#msg1...