A single bitcoin was worth what, a dollar just in April? and just pennies last year. I think Ill pass on buying some silly little nicknacks which could ultimately end up costing me thousands of dollars, thanks.

I've got more than I can spend right now. I'm not hoarding them as a speculative investment but rather because opportunities for buying things I want are still limited.

I don't use my credit card every day either. So Bitcoin merchants are competing for a slice of my commerce that wasn't all that big to begin with, and the goods on offer in Bitland are much more limited.

This is something that will resolve itself with time, I think. I want to buy. It's just not easy enough right now. Things like searchbitcoin help a lot. A good replacement for ClearCoin would help.

It's speculation.  He could be right, he could be wrong.  And not even you know whether he is or not.  The only thing that is certain is that we will find out in the future. 

I think the problem with this statement, being more polite than smexytimez, it that the idea that buying something now costs you money is a logical fallacy.

If I sell silver now at $40 an ounce, and it goes up to $50 next year, did I lose $10?  No.  Did doing the deal now cost me money?  No.

If I buy stock at 50, it goes up to 100, I sell, it goes up to 200, then back down to 25, how much money did I make?  How much did I lose?  What did I earn?  What did if cost?  I made a $50 profit.  It doesn't matter that I could have sold at 200.  I still made a $50 profit.

The 10,000 BTC pizza never cost anyone $140,000.  The guy who bought it spent an appropriate amount at the time.  He didn't lose money by spending it.

Better wording would be that I expect to profit more if I hold it, not that I expect it to cost me by buying stuff now.  But then that gets us back to the argument that if no-one spends bitcoins, and everyone hoards, they won't be worth anything in the future, because they're useless.

This is what I think is going on! If you think too many people are hoarding, then offer a compelling service or attractive goods for sale that will compel them to spend! The other way to look at this is that there is nothing worthwhile to spend bitcoins on, so people hold on to them passively, without really thinking about it.

I doubt it.

As long as Bitcoin is competing against inflationary alternatives (and not broken), I expect that it would be a pretty tempting place to park some value.  Particularly when interest rates one can get from mainstream are near zero, and the regulatory and enforcement agencies are captured by the large financial players and assisting them in screwing everyone else.

A monetary system which was highly inflationary and/or highly taxed would be a more suitable one if high liquidity is desired.  Bitcoin could be re-implemented to enhance some of these features...but I'm not sure how popular that would be.  From what I can understand of the Bitcoin project, it seems unlikely that the designer(s) of the system were not prescient enough to have anticipate the phenomenon you are unhappy about

When a lot of money is flying around, it is easier to reach out and grab a piece if one is positioned well do do so.  I suspect that is part of the reason for the current fiscal policies in the US.

This same security issue could be applied to the reason people are not spending bitcoins as easily, too. Maybe wallet security has something to do with it, too.

It's silly to hoard bitcoins. Just spend it if you have something to spend it on and replace the spent bitcoins by converting USD. The fact that bitcoin value can go up is besides the point. Just put however many bitcoins you want to save/hoard aside and get more that you will spend to actually help the bitcoin economy.

And to those people who think that the person who bought the 10,000 BTC pizza was stupid, what if because he was able to make a real world transaction with his mined bitcoins, he figured that bitcoins was worth the investment. So he decided to triple his mining hashrate and made 20,000 BTC more than before. Now tell me if that purchase was worthwhile.

No, it's not. 10,000 BTC was what pizzas were worth back then. It's like saying a car you bought in the 50s that's appreciated well was a $250,000 car back then. It wasn't.

Or more pertinent to this crowd, it's like thinking the guy you bought gold off of 10 years ago was a chump. No, he had his reasons for selling just like you had your reasons for buying.

Any arguments against buying the pizza in BTC apply equally well to buying the pizza in USD instead of buying more bitcoins.  The guy had to eat something.