Do you think that Bitcoin will ever be revived? It had its boom, but will it ever flourish like it once did?
No, not at all. As others have pointed out, the rate of transactions is and has been increasing. https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions And the number of estimated users is and has been increasing. https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses Bitcoin has great potential aside from just being a currency. It allows for digital assets and smart property. You can also prove that you had a document at a specific time. You can make deposits without even trusting who you're making a deposit to, among many other interesting applications in smart contracts. As a currency, bitcoin is great for developing nations. Many people have access to a computer or smartphone and internet, but not a bank or credit card. Bitcoin allows these people to securely store value and transfer it to anyone in the world with little fees. Immigrants can use bitcoin to send wealth back to their families in a developing nation very inexpensively and efficiently. People in developing nations using bitcoin won't fall victim to too much inflation So long as the 51% of the bitcoin network is not controlled by a malicious party, it is more predictable than ordinary fiat. The rate of increase in currency is known and agreed upon (one block every ~10 minutes, block reward halves every 210,000 blocks). Users can make transactions of arbitrary size with little fees without trusting any third party. So long as a user keeps their key secure, their bitcoins don't go anywhere. I think bitcoin is fantastic and will probably continue to grow as more applications are discovered. It is an extraordinary technology and has much potential.
I obviously really don't understand bit coin... So, if I want to use it to transfer money to another person, I guess I buy some bitcoinage using my everyday currency, and then to use it, the person I send the bitcoins to converts to their local currency. If that's not wildly wrong already, who / how is the currency conversion rate determined when dealing with bitcoins?
Yes, somebody could use bitcoin to transfer wealth just as you described. How the currency conversion rate is determined is by supply and demand, just like any other thing that people buy. If lots of people buy bitcoin, demand increases, and vice versa. Price fluctuates based on changes in demand. The supply increases slowly and steadily from mining. So the exchange rate isn't determined by any one person or party, it's determined by the behavior of anyone selling or buying bitcoin.
Bitcoin is doing better at this moment that it ever has. Most people just aren't aware of it. Daily transactions continue to rise, and the blockchain is now being used to build finance applications by some influential companies including Nasdaq. I don't think that bitcoin will be primarily used as a currency for quite some time. However, apps that transfer fiat such as Abra are using bitcoin behind-the-scenes. An open worldwide ledger for finance has staggering potential, and bitcoin is far and away the most used, and therefore, the most secure. More than ever, I believe that bitcoin is just getting started. EDIT: Here's another use of bitcoin that I just came across: Gift Card security.
Yep, it's far from dead, it's thriving. I see, here and elsewhere a lot of armchair experts. The truth is that BTC's success will not hinge on the adoption by a college kid that thinks they're cool, but rather by adoption by the corporate world. Companies remit payments of millions of dollars per day and have to pay large percentages to do so. If there's a way to facilitate these payments at a far reduced price and the liability isn't a concern, they'll do it. This is a $580 billion a year market. This is the space the banks are competing for right now. Everyone thinks the money is on the consumer side. It's not. BTC is here to stay. It's just not going to be the path towards relevance people commonly think of. Also, US banks and the regulatory climate need to change their tune. -Awful. Stifling innovation.
Yet without regulation, it's going to be manipulated to hell and back and be everything but what the original anarchist/libertarian adopters wanted. The corporate world and "evil banks" are what a lot of the diehard adopters are trying to get away from, and I think they are in for a rude wake up call when they finally do get involved and start playing the game. Wait til high frequency trading and planned booms and busts start happening in an unregulated stock/currency/speculation market such as BTC. Unlike fiat currency and gold, there is absolutely nothing backing BTC. It's the wild west of stocks/currencies/whatever-you-want-to-call-its. I like bitcoin, but it's more ripe for corporate take-over than the fiat currency that a lot of the adopters are trying to get away from. This isn't to say it won't be successful, but it's ripe for pillaging.BTC's success will not hinge on the adoption by a college kid that thinks they're cool, but rather by adoption by the corporate world.
The problem is not that it doesn't have regulation, but rather that it has ambiguous regulation. As it stands, you can't start up a business that facilitates the transaction of bitcoin without being a registered money transmitter in the US. This requires state by state registry, with legal representation in each state you are registering. This is extremely expensive. People could be creating some pretty kick ass businesses in the BTC space, utilizing block chain technology, but they can't. Couple this with the FACT that no banks will bank with a BTC business and you have a virtually impossible industry to do business in, UNLESS you are an established bank, are heavily backed by a known VC firm etc. But the way most startups in a nascent space get up and running is by being boot-strapped and forward thinking. -Those things don't matter with BTC. Good ideas can't flourish. It sucks. I speak from experience.
All of mine we're lost in the mtgox debacle. I was very angry for a long time, but in retrospect I didn't pay much for them and bought them as a novelty. There will always be a value to them, but that value will continue to be shaped with time, certainty, and a wider understanding from more people. The value is normalizing still. As another person stated, $200+ per bitcoin isn't bad at all.
I think, at best, it will live on as inspiration for other methods or ideas that transform how certain transactions happen online. Things like the blockchain or ethererum will probably have their time to shine and either evolve or act as inspiration for other methods. I don't think we'll see bitcoin being the primary method of payments online, or a revival to the level of hype we saw before.
I bought some early and have a couple of coins laying around. I also won some on a fantasy vc league. I sometimes order food with it, but that's about it. I don't think it's dead, there are some cool projects like purse.io, but I don't see mainstream adoption happening anytime soon to be honest.
When the price stabilized everyone talked about it less. Whenever block halvings happen or whenever new wealth flows into it, the price oscillates like waves and the media gets excited until things settle down again before the process repeats itself. Overall, this is all kind of entertaining to watch since every new technology has hype-cycles. Of course the block-chain technology bit-coin is built on will probably be around for a while whether this currency lives or gets replaced by something else since it's pretty much an infrastructure for a different kind of internet.
Bitcoin is not dying, or dead, but meandering in a market trying to find its place. It's a floating currency whose users define its value, so in a way it's less stable than cash though it has a defined growth rate. It doesn't have a central bank to regulate its inflation like other forms of cash do, so its mostly going to depend on supply and demand more so than normal cash values. It has some unique features that allow it to be useful for transactions, but many of those features are approximated by cash used through 3rd party apps like Venmo and Google Wallet. What Bitcoin needs is not to compete against cash where it is less trusted because its not backed by a government, or cards where it offers less protection for chargebacks and fraud protection. It needs to compete on its independence and usefulness to the common user. How great would it be to travel overseas and not lose your shirt to currency transactions? Businesses the world over would love to have all of their profits back and not have to lose to a strong Dollar/Euro. That's not going to happen without some major strategic changes first. #1 is that the Bitcoin banking institutions need to get major payroll companies to offer a Bitcoin direct deposit to their payees. You can't save money on not translating currency if you sell in Bitcoin only to pay in Euro. #2 is making Bitcoin as easy to use as cash through a debit account. It really shouldn't matter what currency your debit card is attached to, but if you suffer transaction fees everything you use a foreign currency, including Bitcoin, you're going to lose money and customers. If you can do those two things, and it's going to have to be done by someone with a vested interest like the banks themselves, then you are going to drastically increase the user base. That increases the trust in the currency, and its exposure to more and more users. Bitcoin isn't dead, but it's not being strategically managed by anyone. In a world with competing options which have a lot to offer, Bitcoin is not differentiating itself amongst the competition. Bitcoin needs a management team.