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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

That's a terrible idea. Bitcoin is difficult to use for both buyer and seller, has high transaction costs, and is associated in the minds of many customers with illegal transactions.

All that is secondary though to the extreme lack of stability of value, which is pretty important in a medium of exchange. You might as well be telling him to accept tulips.

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High transaction costs? Do you have even the slightest idea of what you're talking about? Bitcoin has pretty much the lowest transaction fees of any payment method, and you can even opt out of transaction fees if you're willing to wait slightly longer for processing.

Transaction fees aren't the only cost. You get killed on the bid/ask spread because the USD/BTC market is very illiquid as compared to say USD/INR. The INR/BTC market is so thin you'd be lucky to get fills at all.

I'd be interested to see someone do a USD -> BTC -> INR -> BTC -> USD and see a) if it's even possible in a reasonable amount of time and b) at what cost.

Edit: here's a link to an Indian "local integration partner" of bitpay http://indiabitcoin.com/. They are buying bitcoins for 82% of what they are selling them for.

This assumes you already have bitcoins. Like, your job pays you in Bitcoins or something.

Oh, that isn't the case? Well expect to pay a transaction fee on buying bitcoins (about 5.65% where I live last time I checked).

Once everyone uses bitcoins, it will be a different story. Until then, it's pretty much like anything else.

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