Same degree now? Of course not. Holding bitcoin right now is comparable to buying a CD player in 1995 with only 100 CD titles available so far. There isn't much to do with it yet, but everyone who had a CD player was quite certain that they weren't ever going to touch their cassette collection again.
There certainly is some centralization at the payment processing level, but it won't be that way forever.
Bitcoin has within it everything you need to process all payments already. Coinbase isn't needed at all, except of course as a way to make things easier on everyone. It's just a cleaner UI. It can and will often be replaced by cleaner and cleaner UIs to bitcoin until they are so thin and perfected that there won't be a company with any overhead behind them. It'll just be code in a bitcoin wallet client.
I can't agree to that. It's super-early and we've already got a dozen public corps accepting bitcoin, and pretty much the entire porn and gambling industries.
Between coinbase and bitpay, they're reporting like 45,000 vendors have already signed up. You can browse through 4,300+ non-adult merchants over at coinosphere.com right now. You can even see over 3,200 of the brick-and-mortar only stores all mapped out at the Coinmap.
Considering how far bitcoin development has to go before your grandma feels comfortable using it, I'd say this is quite an awesome sign.
There is no such centralization that you are crediting coinbase with here. In fact Bitpay may have more customers than coinbase, and blockchain.info has even more merchants using their API that aren't even customers... They just offer free software that facilitates merchant and user adoption.
This isn't a concern in any way. Free software will simply be added on top of bitcoin to replace all of this in time.
This is an interesting point. I believe that the genius set of incentives that Satoshi figured out from the beginning are more than enough to ensure that this isn't a problem, but it's fun to speculate what exactly will happen to the millionaire that wants to make it big in crypto, but doesn't follow the tried-and-true path.
Remember, the first was the Winklevii. They put their 1% of all bitcoins into a trust and applied to the SEC to sell shares of that trust to mainstream investors.
Lots of other millionaires, like Kevin O'Leary and Marc Andresson have chosen to either invest in bitcoin itself, or invest in companies like bitpay and coinbase.
But let's say someone like Bill Gates comes along and decides he wants to start his own cryptocurrency and beat bitcoin with it.
I have no doubt he could get it off the ground to compete with other alts. Somewhere between namecoin and auroracoin is where it would likely go, if he takes the time to pump it with proper launch tactics at the beginning.
Then he's got to work on his three pillars. He has to push his coins to user acceptance, perhaps through tons of contests and giveaways. He's got to persuade miners to mine it, maybe by having great stats on the coin like big blocks often. And then he's got the hardest task to do; convince merchants to start accepting it other than the ones in his own business.
But even if he bribes a shitload of visible merchants to accept his coin, his problem becomes that he himself is a central point of failure! Bitcoin has no central point that can sink it. Gatescoin would live or die by Bill Gates' popularity.
If that weren't enough, the problem that may concern a guy like Gates even more about having his own altcoin is that it's out of his control entirely. These people like to have some say in their investments... But if he makes it open source and peer-to-peer, it's completely outside of his control and his worst nightmare will be the day some child porn peddler soils his coin's good name.
(And it should go without saying that any cryptocurrency that is Not open source and P2P is dead in the water and can never take off.)
So no, the rich don't seem to have any choice but to race each other into bitcoin. It'll happen as soon as their other options start looking shitty in comparison.
This is the part of Satoshi's genius that makes me smile every time. They don't need brand loyalty. They want money.
How much money can you make mining doge or litecoin with an investment of, say, $20,000 right now?
If you put that investment into cutting-edge bitcoin mining rigs right now, you will most definitely make far more. The simple, unavoidable fact is that the safer your network is (more hashing power) the more the product is worth, and therefore the more profitable for miners... This is a positive feedback loop that hasn't had a chance of being broken for years now.
I'm ok with people and governments thinking so.
I don't claim to know what the price will be in 3 years, tons of political force on this planet will have a say in that.
What I do claim with pride is the fact that adoption will be FAR higher than it is now by then.
There are currently about 1 million bitcoin holders in the US. That's 1/330th of the country.
Even if obomba bans bitcoin outright, the network effect is still in play, but the application would have to transfer to less-mainstream markets. Therefore I'd guesstimate about 12 Million under an illegal bitcoin here, and 100 million otherwise.
Eventually, making it illegal isn't going to slow it down for long. See: 21st amendment for more on that subject.
I honestly expect it may be illegal for a short while while; that's just what desperate, broke countries try to do on their dying breath: control the money supply in every last way. This time around it will be different, because no one can control the flow of bitcoins.
Marc's a great guy to have on our side; but that's kind of a limited view... The internet is only a flow of information, through which you can lie. Bitcoin however is an uncensorable flow of only truthful information, and all commerce too.
