Unfortunately, from where I stand, BTC is and can never become a currency like the KES or USD. The backbone, the blockchain, is not laid out for that. Too slow and handles very few transactions compared to, say, VISA.
And for reasons that go well beyond what you state, even after the speculators run off and end up crying in their beer. I am no economics expert, but, as far as I can tell, one reason is that although governments are free to print as much "regular money" as they like, the general idea is that the value of money will correspond to the production and supply of goods and services. The degree of "decoupling" is a major part of the explanation for the difference between the US Fed's "quantitative easing" and Mugabe's Central Bank printing by the truckload. The idea of a currency whose value is
solely determined by how much gets "minted" and how many suckers can be persuaded to line up is ...
Another reason is general acceptance. Which are people more likely to accept: government-backed money of some fuzzy, "decentralized" electronic stuff? Robina says that the speculators are the problem and the whole point is "for trading and merchandising - of actual goods and services". But how many people or businesses are actually dealing in bitcoins without a reference to the "inferior currencies" (e.g. KES and USD)? Elsewhere Robina writes that
Satoshi has made me rich God bless him.
http://www.nipate.org/index.php?topic=6172.msg49233#msg49233What does "rich" mean? Is 50 bitcoins considered rich? 25 or 1000? I'm sure she has her own answer. But for me and, I suspect, most people, to determine whether a person with X bitcoins was rich or not, one would probably do a conversion (at the prevailing rate) to "inferior currencies" (e.g. KES and USD).
I suspect that at the end of the day, excluding a handful of geeks---and they are called geeks for a reason---people who have been buying bitcoins, accepting payment in bitcoins, ... all have in mind a nice payout in "regular money"---the "inferior" stuff. Here's a question:
how many people with bitcoins actually use them for goods and services, and how many are just sitting on them? And if the latter, what is the reason?On the "broader scale", Ken Rogoff at Harvard has recently been emphasizing some fairly obvious points to those who think that these funny currencies will take over. The first is that governments simply won't allow it:
It is folly to think that Bitcoin will ever be allowed to supplant central-bank-issued money. It is one thing for governments to allow small anonymous transactions with virtual currencies; indeed, this would be desirable. But it is an entirely different matter for governments to allow large-scale anonymous payments, which would make it extremely difficult to collect taxes or counter criminal activity.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bitcoin-long-term-price-collapse-by-kenneth-rogoff-2017-10And the second is
Finally, it is hard to see what would stop central banks from creating their own digital currencies and using regulation to tilt the playing field until they win. The long history of currency tells us that what the private sector innovates, the state eventually regulates and appropriates.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bitcoin-long-term-price-collapse-by-kenneth-rogoff-2017-10One of things that has recently excited Bitcoin types is Japan's new regulations on virtual currencies. As far as I can tell, much of the excitement is misplaced.
I am no expert on these virtual-currency matters, but here's how I see it: The general idea of
virtual currency appears to have some benefits, and these may well become widespread; the specific idea of
blockchain appears to have many applications outside bitcoin, and quite a few people are looking into those. Nothing there depends on whether bitcoin itself even survives.
