“There are more people in the world who need a currency they can trust than there are people who trust their currency.”

Wences Casares, of Xapo

I am not interested in Bitcoin as a means of buying things. What is the point of Forbes articles by @kashhill about people in California living for a month using just Bitcoin as money, and which coffee shops now accepts Bitcoin. There are lovely cafes in my home town in Plovdiv where I pay for my espresso with a 2 lev note (that’s one euro). Why would I want to mess around with my smart phone to pay the waitress when I loathe using mobile phones, need to dig out my glasses to use it, and rarely carry mine for a walk into town?

taavet hinrikus, CEO of TransferWise confirms that there is no real demand for Bitcoin as a standard money:

“The trouble is, no-one is asking for Bitcoin”

There are loads of comments on the Bitcoin sub-Reddit protesting against Hinrikus’s explanation for not offering an XBT transfer service on Transferwise, but you can’t expect to read sense there.

Everyone asks what will be the breakthrough ‘use case’ for Bitcoin. Will it be for international remittances, where @WesternUnion and @MoneyGramMe have got fat ripping-off their customers? Well I have an income in Britain and need to send remittances to myself in Bulgaria. I used simply to withdraw money from ATMs using my Visa Debit Card and spent hundreds of pounds annually in transaction fees and hidden exchange rate fees. But I have been using TransferWise since 2014, and their rates match the spot rates and their fees are tiny and the money arrives in a few hours. Transferwise.com is great. So why would I use Bitcoin?

There are perhaps two opportunities for Bitcoin in the international payments space.

Transferwise and similar FinTech international payments services are unavailable to the unbanked in less developed economies and there might be an opportunity for Bitcoin there but I remain sceptical.

There’s still no way around paying high fees for international purchases. The banks, credit card companies and @Paypal charge high fees for this in terms of hidden exchange rate fees. This hits me when I buy USD-priced domains at GoDaddy for example.

What about micro-payments. Will that be the breakthrough? Well lots of us got excites about ChangeTip when they started, but they came up against the problem that few people are actually interested in or use Bitcoin and added dollar tipping to woo the non-Bitcoin crowd.

So, I’ve established that Bitcoin is not of great interest for buying things, for making international remittances, for micro-payments ….

I am a massive fan of Bitcoin.

I own Bitcoin and continue to buy it, mainly for reasons of greed as identified by taavet hinrikus. You can check my balance by Googling 14fP5daWTFUP2BeNnt4tEbcuntnKgcArQ1t.

I have also bought a number of Bitcoin domain names like this one:

The central argument for Bitcoin was nailed by Wences Casares:

There are more people in the world who need a currency they can trust than there are people who trust their currency

Americans can read that sentence, or listen to it, but it is hard for them to understand it at a visceral level, or feel its meaning, as it were. Here is Cesares interviewed by @dan_pantera.

Cesares makes the reasonable point that the dollar does actually work rather well for Americans, despite the anti-fiat and often anti-Semitic rants on the Bitcoin Reddit. Americans are not, and never have been subject to hyper-inflation, devaluation, capital controls and confiscation.

But it’s a different story here in South-Eastern Europe.

From Plovdiv it’s a two-hour drive to the Greek border and within three hours my wife and I can be sitting at a taverna by the port in Kavala, dining on Greek salad, grilled fish and squid, and refreshing draught white wine.