While a price increase in bitcoin never is wrong, that's not my main motivation.
For bitcoin to be successful, merchant adaption and general use should be desired. A world where the entire chain, and you can use bitcoin for everything, is the world I would like to see. A world where you did not have to exchange bitcoins for fiat money to sustain yourself.
For example, if WalMart started accepting bitcoins, and perhaps even cut prices on bitcoin purchases to drive adaption and let customers benefit from the lack of fees, and to make book-keeping easier and faster, they could even pay delivery companies and providers of various goods in bitcoin. Employees could be given the option of being paid in bitcoins.
More and more services and goods being paid in bitcoin and less conversion to fiat money taking place , would mean that the need for fiat money would be less, and ideally vanish in the end.
It would be a bit like cash moving into digital cash. After all, the money used today in electronic systems is nothing but bits and bytes in centralized repositories controlled by rich entities. And while I'm not sure about all countries, many countries have the wast majority of purchases and payments taking place digitally. Bank transfers are cumbersome, and often time consuming, and as a customer you have to bow to any stupid rule or regulation imposed by your govt or your bank.
The very concept that a bank can freeze your assets for whatever reason, or discontinue your account for whatever reason, or be pushed to do any of these by a govt. organization is very wrong. At the same time it's wrong that they keep a record of where you spend all of your money, and them reporting this to their head masters are wrong too.
The reason bitcoin or one or more successors will succeed in the future is because it fills the gap that the current payment systems in the world does not. There's no question about it. Credit card payments are an outdated technology, and in a time and age where electronic messages can go from one side of the world to the other in milliseconds, it does not make sense that a bank transfer will take days. And also the fact that funds are checked against various lists to ensure it's not being used for nefarious purposes, more often than not bothering legitimate cutomers is wrong.
Today we live in a digital age, and countries are a concept that's kind of passe, we're all interconnected in this world, and everything works in concert. If we cut down threes in the amazons, everybody in the world is affected.
Sustainable development is important, as we cannot continue as we do today. At the same time, we see that a free market gives opportunities to people. Today, a farmer that makes honey in the US can advertise on the Internet and ship worldwide to anyone. Still some countries will stop the produce in customs. What we need for trade to flourish is less restrictions to free trade, and less restrictions to starting a business.
Any business that's visionary and thinks ahead of their time will continually monitor market developments and foresee what's going to happen, and when the changes hit the coastline like a giant flood, the ones who've prepared themselves will survive, while those who cling to old business models will die.
We see this in many industries today, unless an industry adapts, they will lose out. Instead of fighting piracy online, the movie industry should create the best possible streaming services providing the best movies to a low monthly cost. People would still pirate movies, but if you had everything at your fingertips at an affordable price, why bother with torrents if you could see the newest movie immediately at a cost lower than a couple of burgers a month.
And this is happening..
Changes are taking place in the news paper industry as well. I do think that people will pay for quality material, and doing like they try in france forcing google to pay for indexing links to newspaper articles is quite silly.
At the same time, we can look at Turkei and see how they're trying to block twitter and youtube because there's information about corruption within the Turkish government online, they even hijack google-sites and so on.
This is very stupid on a mind-staggering level. But one can understand that someone wanting to hide something wants to hide his wrongdoings at all costs.
Sadly, with the internet, there's no place to hide - there's no place to remove the truth. Once it's out there it's out there, and the Internet had played a big role in many societes around the world to create change.
And at the same time, bitcoin can help create change as well. Just imagine when some cheap hardware wallet becomes available, and everyone can use it. Perhaps it could even come with a solar panel that can charge it for you.
It could outperform M-pesa.
And the concept of freedom is important as well. If I want to transfer value to anyone in the world, I should be able to do so, instantly without asking permission from anyone.
If I read about someone working to save the rain forest in Amazonas, I should be able to donate to them no matter where in the world I am, without any 3rd party taking an excessive cut. And it should be easy, no need for complicated registration procedures or the usage of gadgets to generate and insert codes in a webform.
So you get the point, ease of use, fast transfer, and virtually no fraud.
From my side it's not a selfish act where I only want WalMart to adopt bitcoin so that I can see bitcoin price increase. I genuinely believe that at one point, there will be no option for WalMart other than accepting bitcoins.
Today, this is the state of affairs online for various payment methods:
http://www.coinometrics.com/bitcoin/btixIn the future it will not look the same, and just think how far bitcoin has gone this far, reaching a market size that of Western Union.
Western Union has been on the market since 1851, but admittedly not into money transmitting business all the time, but see how quickly bitcoin has gained the same amount of market share.
Logically the only way to deal with monetary transactions in todays society is to make it just as easy as typing in an instant message on your screen. It should be easy, and go instantly.
Bitcoin or a successor is the future of payments.
Just like the phone made telegrams obsolete, cryptocurrencies are making the current banking system obsolete.
Now, as this may sound a bit optimistic, just think of how airplanes, the railroad and even the car changed the world. All these inventions were met with big sceptisism when they came. People did not believe in it, and said it was no use for it. The Internet itself, when it first came was met with big sceptisism and pointed as a place where terrorists, pedophiles etc. would gather, and it would be a haven for criminal activity, and then think of how important it is for worldwide trade and communications today, and how it has changed the world.
We are not dreamers sitting on a forum making up wishful thinking. We're here for a reason, and change is happening. Come back in 10 years time, quote this post and tell me I wasn't right.
