My dad in France can send money, instantly, to me who live(s) in the US.
Umm, no. He can't send you "money", using BTC. All he can send you is bitcoin. There's still this pesky business of converting between bitcoin and fiat currency, on either end. And all the preamble about getting your Uncle to sign onto one of these proxy services (and to accept the general idea of bitcoin), and all that.
Maybe the overhead works out favorably in favor of BTC in the end, or maybe it doesn't. But the tradeoff isn't nearly as simple as you're making it out to be.
I guess Paypal just sends you 'paypal credits' then, that you can convert 1:1 to a fiat currency... because, it's not really money, until you can have it in your bank or in your hand as cash, right? And if you need to setup a paypal account, ugh, silly proxy service and all that, linking your bank account and creditcard and sending over your proof of residence and identity.
Look, bitcoin is money. It may not be as universally accepted as a national currency, it may not have some official country issuing it, but it's still money.
You don't necessarily have to convert it to anything. As he said, he actually used bitcoin to buy computer parts at a billion-dollar company like Newegg, which is just one of multiple billion-dollar computer companlies like Dell and Tigerdirect, just to limit the examples to billion-dollar companies in the computer retail industry.
And I recently signed up with Circle. The process of signing up takes 10 minutes, like opening a gmail account, you can then buy and sell bitcoin instantly and it's completely free, zero fees. It's founded by Jeremy Allaire who built a billion-dollar company now part of Adobe (ColdFusion, used by 75 of the fortune 100). Point is, within a very short timespan of 1-2 years we already see industry veterans like him jump into this market to make it more and more frictionless, they already managed free and instant bitcoin purchase and sale, insured, too, in fact.
"converting between bitcoin and fiat currency, on either end"
Perhaps you missed that part where the grand-parent explained you don't even need to convert bitcoins to dollars as merchants begin to accept them (DELL, Dish Network, etc). This is true at the other end too: you can just sell something for bitcoins - no need to use an exchange service.
Umm, no. He can't send you "money", using BTC. All he can send you is bitcoin. There's still this pesky business of converting between bitcoin and fiat currency, on either end. And all the preamble about getting your Uncle to sign onto one of these proxy services (and to accept the general idea of bitcoin), and all that.
Maybe the overhead works out favorably in favor of BTC in the end, or maybe it doesn't. But the tradeoff isn't nearly as simple as you're making it out to be.