If one is engaged in entirely legal activities - no money laundering, no drugs, no illegal weapons, no tax evasion, no slipping around international monetary controls - why would one want to use Bitcoin?
With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, transfer costs of traditional payment methods (1-3%) are totally dwarfed by the risk of holding Bitcoins for even a short period of time.
Maybe there is some opportunity for arbitrage in currency conversion rates, because of the low daily trading volume? But that doesn't seem like a likely profitable investment when you can lose 4% of your value at 3am because of a cascading margin call on a single exchange.
Other than currency speculation and the ease of evading the law, why would anyone want to exchange a reasonably stable national currency for bitcoin?
If one is engaged in entirely legal activities - no money laundering, no drugs, no illegal weapons, no tax evasion, no slipping around international monetary controls - why would one want to use Bitcoin?
With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, transfer costs of traditional payment methods (1-3%) are totally dwarfed by the risk of holding Bitcoins for even a short period of time.
Maybe there is some opportunity for arbitrage in currency conversion rates, because of the low daily trading volume? But that doesn't seem like a likely profitable investment when you can lose 4% of your value at 3am because of a cascading margin call on a single exchange.
Other than currency speculation and the ease of evading the law, why would anyone want to exchange a reasonably stable national currency for bitcoin?