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mwengler comments on Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Orthodox institutions will potentially have the same reasons to adopt bitcoin as they have for adopting USdollars, swiss francs, and the euro: there are customers willing to pay for their bitcoin services.
Bitcoin will be adopted by customers (ignoring speculators and fanboys) because there are things they want to do that they can do more easily, more quickly, or less expensively with bitcoin than through other means.
Will Bitcoin be adopted by customers at sufficient rate to be adopted by financial institutions, or more generally, to succeed? I certainly don't know. I do know that I have no reason to adopt bitcoin. My credit cards cost me nothing, even though they may cost the businesses I use them at a few percent. I am not involved in transferring money internationally.
Credit cards and international transfer of money are two areas where I have read claims bitcoin provides less expensive service. I am not convinced, however.
Can bitcoin replace credit cards? I don't think so. Credit cards allow for an instant transaction with a fee of a few percent charged for the instantness. That fee is presumably largely there to pay for fradulent transactions. Does bitcoin do this? No. Bitcoin may provide fraud free transactions through the blockchain, but only if you wait, with guidelines suggesting a day, and "common sense" suggesting maybe three blocks in the blockchain showing the transaction in question. So thirty minutes? Certainly if Amazon offered me a 3% discount on my purchases if I used bitcoin, and they wouldn't ship until 1 hour had gone by, I would take it. But would I want to pay for a meal in a restaurant and be physically restrained from leaving for 30 minutes while we waited for blocks including my transaction to come in? Credit cards used in the real world for small transactions are not going to be threatened by bitcoin in my opinion.
I can't speak to international transfers due to lack of knowledge.
Irreversible does not mean "fraud free". In fact, one the useful aspects of credit card transactions is that they can be reversed if need be.
International transfer of money is basically about avoiding national capital controls. Bitcoin got quite a boost out of the Chinese trying to get their money out of the country.
For most purposes a single block is enough. I think there only one case in bitcoin history where it wasn't and the victim was a gambling service that was considered to be hostile to the bitcoin network for spamming it.
In many places restaurant these days accepts checks. There no real reason for a restaurant not to trust a person to not double spent.
Trusting a check implies that you can trace it to a bank account, which, thanks to the Know Your Customer regulations, in most cases can be linked to a specific person. Trusting a bitcoin payment implies that you trust a disposable number.