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Porn Will Be Bitcoin's Killer App
An anonymous reader writes "In December, porn.com started accepting Bitcoin for its premium services, and the virtual currency quickly came to account for 10 percent of sales. At the start of January, a post on Reddit's Bitcoin subforum boosted the figure to 50 percent, before settling down to about 25 percent. The tremendous interest has led David Kay, the marketing director at porn.com's parent company Sagan, to talk very positively about the virtual currency: 'I definitely believe that porn will be Bitcoin's killer app,' he told The Guardian. 'Fast, private and confidential payments.'"
Porn is what made VHS win the format war.
Silence is a state of mime.
Heaven forbid. Hell, they are giving it away.
It started with video.
Pretty much any new gadget takes off when it's meshed with porn in some way.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I fail to see how Bitcoin is private and confidential. All the transactions are public (inherently by design). And if you buy bitcoins somewhere with your CC or paypal or bank, it is possible to link the bitcoins to your name.
If you buy them with cash, you could as well buy one of those cash coupons that porn sites might accept too. Then, you gain TRUE anonymity and, as a bonus, you and the seller avoid the massive volatility of the currency (100x decrease/increase in value over a day).
See, unlike a second pizza... a second copy of a porn picture costs very little. Pretty much a fair trade for a Bitcoin. Come on, that thing has been downgraded to the point it's now being used for something so cheap it can't be paid for by Visa/Mastercard. They have a hard and fast rule that charges under 70 cents are always money losers. Apparently, the elemental unit of Bitcoins has fallen below 70 cents.
why do you care about bitcoin at all? :-)
why are bitcoin slashvertisements any worse than all the rest?
methinks you invested during the highs and crashed and burned... sucker
only idiots buy high and sell low
q: why is the u.s. stock bubble is still going on?
a: because there are plenty of idiots in america
Most people only care that the persons they deal with daily don't know about their porn habits. And if you are not prominent, you can be fairly sure that no one does an extensive investigation on it, especially if they don't have any suspicion otherwise. I wouldn't expect it to be anonymous to the police or the NSA, so I certainly wouldn't use it for illegal stuff (well, I wouldn't do anyway, but the point is, even if I were doing such stuff, I certainly would not use bitcoin for it).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If you're into a specific thing and/or performer you can go straight to the source. Generally you only really need to pay once to get access to download the entire archive.
Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrency) is essentially a stock (probably a better term for it, but it's very similar).
What gives value to the stock is people's interest in it. Investment. The difference between Bitcoin and stocks for companies is that companies can turn profit. However, you could think of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as an investment by the people of the internet (and other organizations) in a special currency specifically for the internet. How mining would play into that, I don't know.
I'm just saying. It has value because people say it does. The same reason USD has value. So no, I would say it is not something for nothing. If you have such a problem with BTC, I would say you should have the same problem with the stock market in general. It's basically getting something for nothing (I invest. I wait. I take profits.)
YMMV
The transactions are public, but also hard to follow - most of the wallets are transitory. The path of payment for a typical porn purchase might go something like this:
Buyer buys coins from exchange.
Coins go from exchange to buyer
Buyer spends them on porn, via a one-use payment address.
Coins are transferred from there on to an exchange again to get dollars with.
So identifying a coin purchaser would need to know:
1. A coin the purchaser owns at the time. This could be found out by an insider at the coin-for-dollars exchange, or by someone giving coin to a publicly posted address.
2. Confirmation that the one-use payment address is being used to pay for porn. As it's a one-use address, only someone inside the porn distribution company or the exchange could know this. Unless the company mixes all their payments into a single pool prior to dollar-conversion.
So it could be done, but it's not trivial. You'd need someone inside the exchange willing to compromise confidentiality, which is the same thing you'd need to compromise conventional finance.
Until people start shaming people for buying porn. Can you imagine some fundamentalist group posting the names of buyers of porn?
I suppose if you have a really uncommon and specific fetish, maybe? Or maybe it's a 'support the artists' thing? Show them their work is appreciated, and they'll make more.
More importantly for the porn companies: no charge backs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Not really, no. Who would even read their posting? Who would even care?
Maybe in some Taliban-controlled country it could be a problem, but I doubt they're buying much internet porn over there.
Because it comes up more often than any of the rest.
There was a time when every few days there was a Slashvertisement for Apple products. The result was people complaining as much (and even more) about those as they do now about Bitcoin stories.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That too.
I'm always amused and annoyed by some anti-porn crusaders talking about how the evil porn companies target children. Why would they do that? They have no credit card to pay with.
Not really, no. Who would even read their posting? Who would even care?
Maybe in some Taliban-controlled country it could be a problem, but I doubt they're buying much internet porn over there.
Oh, you'd be surprised. Several years ago, a friend of mine worked in Iraq doing computer forensics on computers taken from Islamic whack jobs. One of his jobs was to watch all the porn videos looking for other video that might have been embedded in it. There was a lot of it. It wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of porn on Taliban computers.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Personally I see it like a limited edition run of "My Little Pony" plates or similar thing that gets traded between collectors. The interest of the collectors is the only thing that gives it value. The people behind it and involved in the trading need to stir up the interest of more potential collectors if they want the thing to maintain or increase in value. The crypto angle has stirred up the interest of people that read Crytonomicon (or similar geeks that got there on their own), loved the currency plot, but didn't wake up to the point that it was all backed by both gold and a complex web of trust (taking the role of Pony fans). Here we have no gold and nobody to trust - just a hot potato to pass on and hope, maybe dragging in others to keep the potato passing on if you are one of the perpetrators of the scam.
Not remotely the same because a lot of people have promised that it has value and people trust them. It's not even like the Zimbabwe dollar, where there were promises but zero trust so it collapsed.
I might not be a registered user, but I've been a Slashdot regular for years. The overall decline of quality of submissions is nothing new, but this particular one puts me over the edge. Recently, Slashdot's become only worth it for the comments, but as even this section's become practically unreadable (and I'm not even talking about the changes to the layout), I guess I owe you a quick final goodbye as I proceed remove Slashdot from my RSS reader in favor of multiple, more specialized news sources.
-m
P.S. While I couldn't care less about my moderation, before anyone flags this off-topic, please consider whether there's any words at all that can be written ON-topic, given the submission.
That would give "proof of work" a wholly new meaning ... ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Why would anyone ever pay for pr0n?
Some idiots do, like the one featured here :- Plumpy
Otherwise, there is enough free stuff to occupy anybody 24/7.
Why would anyone ever pay for an operating system?
Several years ago, a friend of mine worked in Iraq doing computer forensics on computers taken from Islamic whack jobs. One of his jobs was to watch all the porn videos looking for other video that might have been embedded in it.
My wife would kill me if she caught me watching steganography.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
You actually have some evidence that most purchases are from one-time use wallets?
Also, the money has to go into the wallet somehow. This would mean they would buy the exact amount of bitcoins they needed for that particular transaction and that then goes into the wallet they intend to use for that transaction and then delete the wallet. I think that is too short-term for most bitcoin users. Who in their right mind would buy bitcoins day by day as needed? When the value fluctuates so wildly?
I think its more likely they have a bunch of hoarded bitcoins (that they bought when there was a dip in price), maybe transfer some into a one-use wallet and then use that wallet for the dodgy purpose, being unaware that the wallet this bitcoin was transferred *from* is easily determined.
The potential for mischievous use of the block chain is awesome. Could be a marketers wet dream. Especially as less tech-savvy people start using bitcoins.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The same reason why people pay for Windows instead of using FreeBSD?
Currently the business model of most porn websites is based on subscriptions and not on pay per view. A large part of their customers do most likely not even use their product but have just forgot/don't bother to cancel the subscription. Currently there is no way to set up such automatically recurring payments with bitcoin.
Why would a porn company willingly throw away all these paying users that don't actually use anything (i.e. don't cause them any costs)?
maybe i have a mental or optical bitcoin story filter, or i just have a higher annoyance threshold than you, but i don't see that many of them in the listings (including the new ones).
how many have cropped up in the last week?
The last week was unusually quiet with only two stories. But in the last five weeks, there were on average four Bitcoin stories per week, which makes a story about every two days.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It has value because people say it does. The same reason USD has value.
Bitcoin "value" and USD value aren't really the same thing at all.
Consider USD. The same government that issues USD collects taxes in the same currency. Those taxes comes from income and investments. Therefore there is some minimal real-world value backing the dollar. The rest of the USD valuation comes from investors' belief in USD stability. Investors believe that the US government will have the sufficient motivation and ability to do the "right thing" to maintain USD stability. That includes making policy to protect from over-inflation, pay debts, etc.
Fundamentally, investors believe that the US government will be around in 10 years, and therefore value stored in dollars is relatively safe.
On the other hand, all Bitcoin value is based on some variant of greater fool theory.
I'm a cypherpunk. (On a good day, I might describe myself as a cryptographer if it's simpler to, but emphasise my slightly different fields of experience compared to my peers. I hang around a lot of cryptographers.)
I work in porn (fetish porn, both behind, and in, the scenes, and yes, it's risk-aware, consensual kink, and our content is legal both here and in the US and most other places).
I strongly agree. We've been looking into accepting payments in BTC for some time. We hope to go live soon.
You have no idea - unless you also run an adult site! - just how much we hate payment processors, and just how much payment processors hate us. At best, we tolerate each other as a necessary evil business partner. But at worst...
They censor us. There is plenty of legal content that we cannot publish because if we do, they will pull service from us. (Sure, because that's what this industry needs - MORE censorship?!) They apologise profusely and say that this is because of Visa or MasterCard's rules, not their fault. Yet Visa and MasterCard claim to some that they do not have these rules, and to others the opposite. A large porn site based in California definitely gets to post content that we, not based in the US, definitely do not, even though it's totally legal in both our countries. It's not the large site's fault: they're doing the best they can and I appreciate their competition. I just wish we got a fairer deal, and I know the US State Department is heavily involved somewhere in all that mess. Wonderful. That's all we need. Fucking diplomats. (Actually, no, that might be a cool idea. Putting that in the notebook.)
They blame us for chargebacks. They apparently hate porn because they get chargebacks from people who buy porn, and then get buyer's remorse: jealous spouses, or something. Nope, not seeing that. That's not been our experience with our customers. We've only had 2 chargebacks from customers, ever. Our paying customers are very happy and enthusiastic about our content, which means we must be doing something right. Yay.
They blame us for card fraud. We have a very low rate of card fraud: lower than companies who sell computer parts. And it's easy to see why. If people want to steal our content they don't have to steal credit cards to get it. They just pirate it: it gets reposted on tumblr or sex.com or Bittorrent or RedTube or PornHub, or anywhere else, really. We KNOW that, of course: and we can either spend our time chasing around taking it down, or we can spend our time making more porn: I don't know about you, but I prefer the latter. There isn't anything we can do about piracy except hope they keep the watermarks and people see it, like it, decide they want more of our content, and come to our site and buy some, and so, it becomes promotional material. Is it sustainable? That's a business model problem. It is for us, right now. Though plagiarists who remove watermarks from stuff, or put their own on it? They can fuck off - that's just rude, and that's coming from a Pirate Party member. (Well, there's nothing we can do about it that doesn't involve being massive arseholes to potential customers - Prenda Law can eat a dick for giving our industry a bad name by using porn piracy as an excuse for outright blackmail!) You can't pirate computer parts (unless they've gotten REALLY good at 3D printing while I wasn't looking!). Result: we don't get carders, computer companies do.
Sure Bitcoin's value fluctuates compared to currency. Sure interchanges between hard currency and Bitcoin will likely be regulated (Bitcoin itself, of course, cannot be regulated in any useful manner). But the option to potentially remove a payment processor which is ultimately based in the US from the chain is a HUGE win. We can even pay our hosting and DNS directly with Bitcoin now. There are some things in life that hashcash can't buy. For everything else, there's Bitcoin. =)
It's not anonymous in the sense that it absolutely can't be tracked. Hell, the blockchain is public, and the US Govern
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Not from. To. That's how merchants confirm who is paying for what. So you can find out a celebrities bitcoin wallet address and see how much they have in there, and you can see them spend the money... somewhere. But you can't tell who got it, unless they gave it to someone else who published their address.
It'd be easier to tell if they donated to a tip jar though. I can imagine that with easier payments some porn sites might use that business model - come, look at the porn and ads, and if you like it throw a little bitcoin to the address on the bottom of the page.
I doubt he ever found any true stenography in there.
A few experts years ago found an effective way to detect commonly used forms of stenography in jpegs, and tried feeding two images from ebay through the detector, plus another million from usenet. Not a single one had any stenographic information that they could find, and their detector was demonstrated as very reliable.
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting.pdf
The NSA leaks did reveal that they have an interest in porn though: They've been monitoring the porn use of some unnamed 'radical muslims' in the middle east were planning on using it to blackmail them into silence or destroy their credibility. It's not clear if they actually pulled off the blackmail or discrediting part though, the leaked document is from the planning stage.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25118156
I suppose if you have a really uncommon and specific fetish, maybe? Or maybe it's a 'support the artists' thing? Show them their work is appreciated, and they'll make more.
That's an interesting fetish... maybe there should be porn where the artists are spending money on porn whilst watching porn of people spending money on porn (recurring).
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
isn't it mostly free one way or the other?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
At sites such as titsforbitcoin cam girls are now accepting Bitcoin, seems perfect because its anonymouos on both sides and there is no need for a recurring payment system, its all ad hoc payments when the user feels the need, pretty cool.
I'm pretty sure drugs and hiring Russian botnet operators are already Bitcoin's killer apps.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Bitcoin is not a pyramid. A pyramid is a scheme where a few at the top depend on a large base to keep it going. Bitcoin is a peer to peer system like BitTorrent. Hard to believe you got a score of 5 Insightful for such a non-insightful comment.
ayottesoftware.com
Myth: Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_is_a_pyramid_scheme
ayottesoftware.com
Can this stupid Ponzi scheme just crash and burn NOW so we stop seeing all the Slashvertisment for it?
Fuck Bitcoin. Fuck "cryptocurrency" in general.
It's a damn pipe dream (something for nothing), and we'll all be better off when people wise the fuck up.
While I generally agree with your sentiments porn could solve one of bit coins serious shortcomings, illiquidity. If enough people buy Bitcoins that will introduce enough real currency into the system that it becomes a viable way to conduct payments.
It doesn't address the volatility issue, however; which really causes issues for both sides of the transaction but especially the content provider. Exchanges would need to convert at whatever the daily rate was when the purchases were made. exchanges could time their buy sell to get more per Bitcoin when the purchaser turns currency into Bitcoin and pay the provider when Bitcoin is higher in value; essentially getting extra Bitcoins to conduct the transaction. This is different then simply have a buy / sell price and doing the transaction instantaneously since the exchange could manipulate the timing to their advantage.
The volatility also means the exchange would have to decide do they want to assume the risk that they will wind up with a lot of withdrawals at a higher price then they paid and thus risk running out of funds if enough buy orders don't exist to cover withdrawals? If that happens and they freeze withdrawals they will cease to be a viable transaction mechanism as companies cannot afford to have freezes on cash flows.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Precisely. The initial perpetrators designed it so that a large base would artificially increase the value of what they are sitting on. It is deflationary by design and a textbook pyramid ponzi scheme.
Saying it twice and linking to a very biased source does not make it so.
The truth is the same regardless of the source. I can't have an opinion on the sum of 2 + 2 just like I can't have an opinion on whether the Bitcoin network is a pyramid scheme.
ayottesoftware.com
If you do want to keep your wish secret the BitCoin is not the payment method for you. All transactions are public and even if you use secondary accounts it's not hard to trace back to your primary one.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A currency is meant as an enabler of trade, it is not a commodity in and of itself but is rather intended to be temporarily held until you exchange it for something else. Indeed, holding on to most currencies is an extremely poor investment because inflation will gradually reduce their value.
A currency has value because you can use it to buy goods, services, and trade it for other currencies. There are many sites now such as the one mentioned in this article which will exchange goods or services for bitcoins, and there are several advantages to paying for services using bitcoins over other forms of payment.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
because it's the path of least resistance? No
Yes.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
No, that's a self serving opinion. Truth can be found from those that gain no personal benefit from telling lies.
Wikipedia? Maybe. Scammer central? Most definitely not.
And unless you're one of those borderline obsessed people who have to collect every single video or photo of their favorite porn star, sending them gifts and whatnot...
Paying for it is simply not the path of least resistance.
FFS... whenever I use someone else's computer, without all the add blockers I have on my own, I can't seem to open a torrent search engine without being recommended at least a window or two of porn.
It has come down to it that the path of lesser resistance for NO porn practically does not exist any more.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
and as I've got my filters set, this is the first discussion in bit/lite coin that I've bothered to read in the last 2 months so what's it got to do with the price of tea in china anyhow? It's like all the Apple slashversitements - I don't even see most of them as they're filtered just like most of the bit/lite coin articles.
In regards to the number of articles, they have served a useful purpose by explaining why it's so fucking hard to even find a Radeon 7850 at a reasonable price. Turns out that everyone is buying them for litecoin mining. I'm looking for one to replace an aging 5670 that's pushing 4yrs as the card offers the most bang for buck with a trippling of performance - that's right a 3x boost in performance for under $200, which is why I've been holding off replacing my little 1st Gen 5670 (discontinued 4 months after release - down rated 66xx series due to failing some DX10 tests but works fine otherwise).
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Steganography, not stenography.
The real Value of the USD is the god damn Marines. It's got nothing to do with taxes or anything else as there isn't enough gold in Fort Knox to back even a tenth of what's out there. Just look at Iraq - we sure as hell didn't need to send the troops over there to protect the people. Let em keep killing each other. The only reason we did was "Oil" as Haliburton wanted to ensure they were the one's pumping and transporting it. Corporate Expansion at it's finest (East Indies Company for those historically minded).
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I'm not dumb enough to pay for porn when there's so much freely available on the net and shaming me? I'm fucking shameless so if they don't like it they can get the fuck off my lawn and quit peeping in my windows.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
People pay for Windows because it comes preinstalled on most new PCs, and there's no way to buy them without Windows. Imagine if the porn industry got a sweet deal like that...
As someone working in the business: no, video on demand isn't all that big. (Big enough, for it not to be ignored, but not exactly all that interesting) What seems to work best is live shows. People (well, mostly men) are willing to pay for that.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
For people with no access to credit cards (eg teens) or those who don't want "super hard gay xxx" on their monthly credit card statement bitcoin makes sense. They can make a paying customer out of somebody that would never pay in the first place, the rest can use their cards.
And teens less likely to be paying the electricity bill so can mine 24/7 to their hearts content.
Bitcoin is a pyramid. There are a total of about 21 million bitcoins which can be mined. The easier ones are mined first, leaving the harder ones to be mined later, forming a pyramid of mining rate. About 11 million have been mined so far, so we are about halfway up the pyramid.
It is not a pyramid scheme in the traditional sense, where the addition of new members directly props up older members. But its design causes the same thing to happen, just indirectly. You don't seriously believe bitcoins will remain viable once the last coin is mined? At that point (probably long before, as adoption rate far outstrips mining rate increase), it ceases being a currency and turns into a collectable - its value increases over time because more people want it, rather than holding relatively steady like a currency. And collectables are only worth as much as people want to collect it - there is zero reason to collect a string of numbers.
You may not like bitcoin, but it isn't a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme takes money from new investors to make fake payments to the existing investors and fails as soon as there aren't enough new players to keep the scheme running. None of that matches bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a method of exchange. Some people take bitcoin directly in exchange for goods or services, some people accept it indirectly though a service that converts it to another currency for them. Gold is the best historical analogue and it'd be just as hard to buy a loaf of bread with a block of gold as a bitcoin wallet unless there was a merchant who will accept it directly or a middle man to convert it to a form they do take.
Bitcoin has no reliance on new people participating. Only that people are willing to use it as a method of exchange.
The Bitcoin network still works great even if everyone has an equal share of Bitcoins. There's no dependence on a base which is the key identifier of a pyramid scheme.
ayottesoftware.com
Now we really will be able to call it "buttcoin", and unironically, too.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Awkward words of similar spelling but quite different meaning do lead to confusion. How'd that mess of a situation come about? I'll have to find an entomologist to ask.
We should commission a study or something. Who are these folks? Good $deity, I haven't paid for porn since... since... (hang on, I'm thinking, dammit!)
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
So how, exactly, is this a killer app? Bitcoin is still just a fancy barter token (and I don't see anything that will change that). Anyone with intelligence will still buy BTC and spend them ASAP or recieve BTC and convert them ASAP. Etc... etc...
The only people who profit from this are the exchanges.
There is unbelievable amounts of every kind of porn out there now.
Rule of 34.
There are many sites with free porn in copious quantities. So where is the value to bitcoin?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And you're not paying directly in bitcoin on most of these sites.
You're paying into a service that immediately converts the bitcoin to real currency.
So yeah, no "exchange of goods and services".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Once the last coin is mined, the reward will have shifted to collecting transaction fees, or tips for prompt inclusion of a transaction in the ledger.
a bigger head. I mean you thought the industry was stuck up before with their "we're the reason you used VHS" yada yada. Now with their 4K shoots and then bitcoin... yeah their heads just gonna get bigger and bigger. That said I don't think this is the same as VHS. Who knows I may be wrong I'm no techanalyst but there's obviously a big advantage to being able to pay for porn with an extremely private currency. Considering the amount of social stigma attached to the type of person who would pay for porn. I mean watch porn.
Just another second banana
but dollar bills are reasonably private unlike a credit card. Long as you don't fill up at the ATM there you're pretty safe privacy wise when you use cash.
Just another second banana
The "gold" in this case is the difficulty of doing SHA256. And a nifty invention called the blockchain which, as a computer person, you should know about. The blockchain is the real innovation. It's this idea that we can build a complex web of trust by signing and resigning the same huge ledger with newly created keys. It's actually really brilliant and totally legitmate from a cryptographic perspective. Even Bruce Schenier says so. Now economically, who knows? You need supply and demand, of goods and services. That's already starting and really Porn is an ideal service for bitcoin because it's something people like to keep more private than other things, and they might be willing to jump through some of the hoops BTC and other cryptocurrency has right now to be a little more private.
You missed the third option of somebody being pissed off about an old scam modified to be baited for geek and seeing articles pumping it to search for fresh meat on a geek site.
So no more slow than herbivores taking care when the carnivores are prowling around.
Porn may tip the favor for a particular coin but there is one market that can make Bitcoin or any given altcoin an huge (relative to current) market.
Marijuana is a Schedule I drug no matter what any State's laws say. This Federal classification means that banks cannot do direct business with dealers, transporters, processors or growers of it. Several publications have covered this problem.
People in the trade are either working in very grey banking situations or dealing with large amounts of cash. Having to pay your $20,000 taxes this quarter with a duffle bag of twenties is a perfect situation for robbery. Pot dispensaries on Colorado, USA are starting to figure out that they don't need banks to deal with Bitcoin or other altcoins. Right there could be a real Business-to-Business revolution for digital currency.
Sure, today a digital coin is mostly useful for transactions. A business would have to convert between cash and coin at the ends. And even when you can go bitcoin from customer to suppliers for your business you'll still need to get out cash.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Interesting point about the MJ suppliers.
However, nothing you say even implies your last statement has validity. I first properly realised "what money really is" less than 10 years ago when I started reading about gold and monetary systems and the parent is completely correct (and already +5!). It is simply an enabler of trade. Anything can be used, as long as the buyer and seller have trust in the tokens used. Clay pellets also work. In today's society we have governments that want their piece of the action but to date there don't seem to have been too many anti-crypto-currency government campaigns, so unless that changes then the future is bright. If a currency can be traded for a particular good or service then the currency is logically and functionally equivalent to any other for the purpose of trade.
Money doesn't even need to be backed by anything real/physical - almost all of today's currencies are proof of that. Governments/banks can simply create ex-nihilo 10s of billions in $ equivalent every month - as long as trust is maintained then the system continues to work. Rulers long ago realised that controlling the currency was a very, very effective means of controlling the population but it hasn't always been that way and certainly doesn't need to be.
Think for a moment what it means for someone outside of the US (and a few puppet states) to have a US dollar account. They can't withdraw that money and buy a loaf of bread - they can't even buy goods/services from US-owned companies like McDonalds! Does that make it "as worthless as bitcoin"? According to many, yes, but we all know that USD is not (currently) "worthless" and that is because people still have trust in it. You don't get taught this in high school economics though...
Then get a philatelist to donate money to fix the problem.