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Mark_Friedenbach comments on Why you should consider buying Bitcoin right now (Jan 2015) if you have high risk tolerance - Less Wrong
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Silk Road may get a ton of press but it's a really tiny part of the bitcoin ecosystem.
But assuming that you are an enthusiast who uses bitcoin for ideological motives, what is the point of using bitcoin for anything that is not shady and/or illegal?
What competitive advantage does it have over other forms of digital funds transfer? I mean practical, short-term advantages available on the margin to the parties involved in every transaction, not political things like "the government can't regulate the supply".
It's cheap. You can send a large amount of bitcoins anywhere in the world with very very low transaction fees. Merchants can accept it without a ridiculous fee.
While your funds are stationary they are not subject to seizure. That's not a political statement by the way.
If you convert it from/to cash immediately before/after each transaction, then you face exchange fees. And if I understand correctly, most exchanges have daily limits. And anyway exchanges are shady businesses: see what happened to MtGox.
If you hold significant amounts of bitcoin then you face volatility risk.
Why not? I'm pretty sure that your government can force you to hand out your wallet.
Maybe? I mean probably you wouldn't say that if you didn't have a reliable source for it/it wasn't probably true, but I don't think it's obviously true enough that you can just start off assuming everyone's on the same page and ignore darknet markets to say "citation needed", especially not if you're at the same time acknowledging that the darknet markets get a lot of press.