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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

This is tangential to your point, but I recently did a international money transfer to a friend. The fee was $40AUD for <$1000USD sent. They received it in a day and a half.

For Bitcoin I need to:

* Get the requisite amount of bitcoins, plus a percentage extra to protect against fluctuations (BTC crashed is not a valid excuse for non-payment of rent)

* Help said friend set up a BTC wallet, plus security

* Find a trustworthy person willing to exchange USD for BTC at some agreed value

* Send friend to person and hope the exchange goes as planned.

I'd love to use BTC in place of IMT but it's just not easy enough yet.

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Yeah, my grandma has also run into some troubles when trying to send an email. She had to:

- Investigate which PC she should buy

- Find someone willing to sell a PC at a fair price. This is a problem because PCs get old really quick, and some vendors will try to sell you old PCs at their original prices. I don't know how they expect PCs to be useful if they go down in value so fast. Why buy a PC today, when you can buy it at half its price in a year?

- Ask someone for help to connect all the wires

- Fail to send an email. Learn that she also needs an internet connection

- Investigate which ISP she should hire

- Etc...

With traditional mail, she just writes the letter and drops it in the post office.

When someone tries to use email and fails, they can lose some time.

When someone tries to use bitcoin and fails, they can lose their home. When silk road 2 lost their users' bitcoins to theft, there was a comment on Reddit about a silk road user who became homeless because they had converted their savings into bitcoin and stored the coins in silk road's webwallet. When the coins were lost, so was their home, since they could no longer afford rent.

Bitcoin needs to become pro-consumer with strong protections and convenience. There are dozens of ways to lose your money, so no one wants to convert a sizable portion of their wealth into bitcoin, which means no one has bitcoin on hand to spend at a whim. Eventually merchants are going to start wondering why they're bothering to let people buy their products via bitcoin since very few people buy anything via bitcoin.

If bitcoin becomes safe and convenient, bitcoin adoption will follow.

a lot of these people don't have that good of arguments, so they instead use crappy metaphors to make their points. they take something that is totally different than bitcoin and try to use that to make their point. but they need examine f it is a valid analogy. I don't think a PC, a consumer good, can be compared to something that's supposed to function as a currency. one is a store of a value and one has a functional use. if your grandma wants to save her money she should by stocks or bonds or something with low volatility. if she wants to send an email she should get a computer, not for storing value, but for it's functional use. and if she wants to get around town she should by a car, even though they depreciate. I don know how op ever thought it made sense to compare bitcoin and computers.

That's a bit harsh. The metaphor made a lot of sense, because their point was that bitcoin is currently hard to use, and will get easier with time, which is true.

Agreed, it works best now when both parties are actively using Bitcoin. Otherwise, extra steps are added like you enumerate.

That number of Bitcoin users is only increasing with each passing day.

4% and a day and a half is outrageous. You can get < $1000 in BTC on Coinbase instantly if you have a high enough verification level and your friend can sell on an exchange in his country as soon as he gets them (10 minutes) to avoid the volatility risk.

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