Comment by enmaku | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enmaku | Hacker News Reader

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Bitcoin replaces that layer. I've personally transacted business in Bitcoin without converting it back to traditional currencies and it works pretty damn well, actually. At the moment the primary reason Bitcoin "needs" to be converted back into traditional currency to be useful to the masses is that they haven't started using it yet.

Think about it: if 1% of people are using Bitcoin then that means there's only a 1 in 100 chance that any given transaction you make can be made with Bitcoins. That's an admittedly low degree of usefulness. If you can get 2% of the people to start using Bitcoin it just became twice as useful and half as many transactions will now require you to convert funds back to traditional currencies. At some "critical mass" adoption level, Bitcoin becomes just as useful as any other currency without such a constant need to move in or out of traditional currencies.

It's called the Network Effect and it's a hell of a market force.

Also your argument is invalid because you could say the exact same thing about holding a bank balance in USD while living in Europe: "But I have to exchange these dollars for Euros in order to even use them at all, man this U.S. Dollar is just completely worthless and unnecessarily complex because no one around me will accept it."

"Think about it: if 1% of people are using Bitcoin then that means there's only a 1 in 100 chance that any given transaction you make can be made with Bitcoins."

You're going with the "we just need to get 1% thing", huh? What percent of the world's population is currently using Bitcoin?

1% was a completely arbitrary example, it wasn't meant to set a goal or anything. I was just illustrating the point that Bitcoin isn't ONLY good if you convert it to USD/EUR/whatever, it's just not adopted as widely as those currencies.

"it's just not adopted as widely as those currencies."

Which brings us full-circle back to my original point.

What percentage of the world's population was using the internet in 1983?

I don't have data going back that far. My earliest data I have on-hand goes back to 1997 at which point about 2% of the world (11% in the developed world) had internet access. I do have host count data, though and can tell you that in August of 1983 there were a whopping 562 web sites in existence. In July 1997 when only 2 (or 11) percent of people had access, there were about 19.5 million. As of January of this year there are almost 900 million.

So let's extrapolate: There were about 5.84 billion people in the world in 1997, 2% of which is about 117 million people on the internet (round numbers). Thus, in 1997, we can estimate one in every 6 internet users had their own web site.

Today there are about 6.97 billion people in the world and about 35% of them have internet access (74% in the developed world, but I digress). This means that about 2.4 billion people are responsible for about 900 million web sites - that's one web site per 2.7 internet users. If we work backwards from this imaginary (and probably wrong) line, we can estimate that there were about 3,000 internet users back in 1983.

There are currently estimates that the Bitcoin network is made up of between 15 and 20 thousand users. Let's call it 15, just to be pessimistic. Adjusting for world population that puts us about on-par with the internet's adoption level in 1987. Bitcoun is about 4 years old, while the 1987 internet was about 6 years old, which means we're growing 50% faster than the internet did. Assuming nothing gigantic implodes along the way, Bitcoin is on its way to greatness.

Of course that's assuming you can compare Bitcoin to the internet, which you probably can't ;-)

As a fairly untechnical user, I would like to add that as soon as I figured out how to actually get bitcoins (bitinstant) the process became quite natural and the usefulness apparent.

"Which brings us full-circle back to my original point."

It still doesn't make your claim correct. Your claim that Bitcoin can't achieve widespread adoption because of the complexity of mining doesn't even make sense.

Not every user has to mine and mining is what this article was about, not the parts of Bitcoin that everyone will use, but the parts that only a few will use but everyone seems curious about.

This article was akin to "How the printing presses the Fed uses works" combined with "How the Visa/MasterCard payment system works" - again, something you don't need to know to use the consumer end of that system, but which quite a lot of us are curious about anyway.

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