And how many smartphone users are there again?

~Bruno~

Therefore, the Bitcoin niche user would be a smartphone owner that doesn't have a bank account. And that number is? (I remember seeing that somewhere, but would be great to read it again in this informative thread)

~Bruno~

FTFY

Correct: http://mobilemoneyafrica.com/category/news/south-africa/page/2/

ABSA (Barclays) bank is/has implemented this in Africa. The concept is Mobile Banking whereby your bank account is linked to your mobile phone and small payments can be sent quickly and easily within existing infrastructure.

From that article
WTF are they talking about? MtGox closed?  Or is it desinformation? They can't be talking about TradeHill, at least not on those terms lol

oops, just saw people already corrected them on the comments, namely evoorhees.

¹- Confirmed
²- Confirmed by personal experience

"Providing financial services to the 2.5 billion people who are 'unbanked' could boost economic growth and opportunity for the world's poor," says World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/19/business/poor-bank-accounts/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

For reference, I have spent a lot of time in Thailand and even learning the Thai language.  If you wander around you'll find lots of poverty and homeless.  However what is amazing is that every single one of them has a cell-phone!  Even when we went out to the middle of nowhere in a desert area with little huts/tents.  I didn't see any electricity hookups, but they all had cellphones.   I have no idea how they even charge them!  One of them using it to play music on speakerphone.   But I don't know if they have service plans with those phones... maybe they just play games an music with them?  Seems unlikely.

Wiki has a list of cellphone ownership rates, showing Thailand with 105% ownership.  From looking at the list, there's actually quite a few such countries, and some of them are places that have high poverty rates, and likely low bank-account-owning rates.  So contrary to some of the replies to this thread, I think there are quite a few places where Bitcoin on the phone can really catch on.  Only problem with Thailand is that their currency has almost an identical symbol

What makes you think that all the people on the black market would switch to bitcoins, if only people doing illegal things used bitcoins? The only entry points into BTC are the exchanges or mining, and if 90% of btc traffic was illegal stuff, the exchanges at least would be under massive scrutiny.

Isn't it also far more advantageous to have a currency you can actually spend in useful ways? If all you could get by selling weapons was btc, and you could only buy other weapons for btc...would anyone bother with btc? There's no non-weapon profit to be had, whereas there is tons if you go via USD.

It doesn't make sense to expect or rely on the idea that an exclusive use of bitcoins by the black market would make a bitcoin extremely valuable. If everyone in the world accepted bitcoins for goods/services, then they might add demand if they can use it almost anonymously.

When they are done with their feeding frenzy of debt-based financial instruments, Bitcoin will be their wafer thin mint.