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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

The bigger problem with mainstream consumer adoption is the fact that mainstream consumers don't have any bitcoins to spend.

Then there's the fact that you have to use an exchange to buy the coins in the first place and... let's just say bitcoin exchanges aren't exactly known as secure financial institutions. It seems a large bitcoin exchange is hacked and shuts down just about weekly:

Just hours ago: Cavritex, Canada's largest bitcoin exchange, announced that it was hacked and will shut down

4 days ago: BTER of China was hacked and lost $1.75m

Last week: Exco.in was hacked, apparently lost all customer-held coins, and shut down

Last week: Hong Kong's MyCoin died and was apparently a ponzi scheme that had $387

And that's not even counting the abrupt closures of other exchanges telling users to get their funds out ASAP or lose them.

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I think we are & will continue to see mass die-offs of the current generation of exchanges, as many were formed in a time where regulation and security were of less concern--combine that with the fact that they amass enormous amounts of untraceable value under what is essentially a single, private key, they're the ideal target.

The beauty of true P2P is that while a central authority still has the potential to compromise the network, the distributed nature at least distributes the attack surface equally. I imagine banks & security-conscious, established digital financial service providers will step in at some point to assume the role of the exchanges. It may be a step back for privacy and anonymity (sadly) but a major step forward for its legitimacy.

More importantly, the concept of interchangeability is emerging. When you find that BTC and $ transactions can be reconciled seamlessly (ie, agnostically with no logistical concern to source whether credit card, BTC, EBT, etc.) I think that P2P option may start to happen naturally. Providers like Stripe abstracting this is certainly the first step.

[edit] I would love to see what would happen if a company like Venmo that deals primarily in socail micro-transactions were to attempt a UX integration.

> you have to use an exchange to buy the coins

No you don't. You can sell stuff on Craigslist for bitcoins. You can mine. You can buy coins in person from a friend/from localbitcoins. You can receive remittance from your oversea family in bitcoins. You can buy them from a Bitcoin ATM. Etc. There are tons of ways to acquire bitcoins without "having" to use an exchange.

Shameless plug, you can also get paid with bitcoins via https://www.incoin.io/. We need more of this. I'd be happy to see another proper payroll company with the option to pay via bitcoin.

Look at http://www.reversecoin.org/ Reversecoin allows transactions to be reversible within a specified period of time. Over time, I expect mechanisms like these to be build into Bitcoin itself. Disclaimer: I am the lead dev for Reversecoin.

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