Here's Why People Don't Buy Things With Bitcoin (vice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: One reason for this, if you live in Toronto like me (or anywhere else for that matter), is that there's basically nowhere to spend digital coins in the real world. Coinmap, a service that maps bitcoin-accepting locations all over the world, shows a few places that accept bitcoin in Toronto, but it's clearly out of date -- I called several businesses listed on the site and they had no idea what bitcoin even is. A bigger problem is perfectly illustrated in a Reddit post from Wednesday morning complaining that a bitcoin transaction worth just $9 still hasn't gone through the network after two days of waiting. Two. Days. The likely reason is that the fee attached to the transaction in order to incentivize faster confirmation -- 50 cents, which is about as much of a premium as I'd pay for a $9 transaction -- simply wasn't enough. "Should I have paid $3 on a $9 transfer to get it processed?" the person wrote.

Comments

Re:bitcoin isn't real, either

[nine-times]

Not necessarily. A lot of stuff doesn't have to do with any real or perceived value. Prices can be driven by speculators speculating what other speculators will speculate.

That is, it's gamblers betting on what they think other gamblers will bet on, knowing that those other gamblers are also betting on what other gamblers will bet on. Even if they're pretty sure that Bitcoin is all hype and will eventually collapse, they're placing a bet that the bubble won't burst quite yet.

Inflationary bubble

[Neo-Rio-101]

The strength of Bitcoin comes from the health of the computers maintaining the Bitcoin network, and those computers are only on the network is because they're getting paid in bitcoin to maintain it.

Once it becomes hard to impossible to mine bitcoin, to the point where it is not financially feasible to do so, Bitcoin's network will weaken and fold as miners move onto the next crypto-currency with a better ROI.

This will have the net effect of weakening the number of systems maintaining bitcoin - and potentially weakening the strength of the bitcoin network. This *might* possibly cause bitcoin's price to suddenly drop as people pull out.

It's either that or bitcoin has to continue to inflate for eternity I guess.