Ok I had to
reply to one of the threads, but this deserves it's own topic, for good reason.
Everyone is concerned about security... and they are blaming e-wallets... even though a month ago one of the forum users had 25,000 bitcoins vanish from his client.... there were several posts referencing a "bitcoin gobbler" that was stealing bitcoins from people's desktops as it appears to infect the standard client.
When an individual asked "so how do I access my bitcoins from another location" the reply was "SSH into your machine... then do X and do Y and do Z" of course.. because grandma knows how to SSH.
the problem with the online currency is that it was built by us individuals familiar with the process. Grandma can't invest $300,000 of her 6 million dollar inheritance in bitcoins because she doesn't know what a wallet.dat is, she doesn't understand how to send money to an address that stretches across the screen, and she's NOT going to SSH into anything. She's not even going to understand what peer to peer is. Websites just magically appear to her with no understanding of how it works.
But she could increase the price of bitcoins and make them far more valid of a currency by depositing $300,000 USD into bitcoins. She might even use them to buy something from an ecommerce site that accepts bitcoins, or she may also have a meal at Meze Grill in New York, if she could figure how to pay them in bitcoins. Asking her to lug her laptop in and send to a huge address isn't going to help matters.
She knows how to login to her banks website, she's wondering why she can't login to her bitcoin account.
The problem is that there are 2 types of people in this world.
1 - technically smart, with limited funds.
2 - much richer, but not technically smart.
Our problem is that virtually everyone is in this forum is 1 .... most of us here are not 2.
But we NEED #2 in order to grow bitcoins as a community.
type 2 people won't install the standard bitcoin client on their desktop... period. Much less SSH to that client from a remote machine.
So the end result is that ewallets are needed... in fact ewallets will be the vast majority of bitcoin transfers in the future, they will as whole most likely will be the defacto way of paying people within the next few years.... IF WE MAKE IT the next few years.
the problem is security, (on your desktop and in the cloud) and making it easier to use and understand for grandma... the only valid solution to that is an ewallet....
Even if you make the easiest to use client on earth, you're still going to have to ask grandma to install it from IE: 6 ... because IE : 6 came with her computer.... see my point.
