Because someone can point a gun at your head to defeat ECC. They can't do that with banks. That's why people keep their life savings in a bank, and why you'll need a bank even with Bitcoin.
I always felt bitcoin was more about replacing paper money than replacing banks. Banks give you interests, Bitcoin just sits there and the amount (in bitcoins) never changes.
> Because someone can point a gun at your head to defeat ECC.
You can store an encrypted paper wallet in a safety deposit box at the bank if you're worried about that threat. You don't, however, need to hand it over to the bank to lend it out to bad debtors if you don't want to, which is the threat FDIC protects against.
There are at least two problems with this approach. First, this just makes you a target when you go and retrieve your paper wallet. Secondly, even if you never actually leave the bank with your paper wallet, this means you need to physically go to the bank every time you want to transfer money. But people need to transfer money on a daily basis in order to pay bills, meaning any access to a bitcoin wallet needs to be highly available. A paper wallet stored in a vault isn't.
The counterargument to this is to store a portion of your savings in a paper wallet. That's fine, but it's not what's going to make Bitcoin mainstream, which is what the conversation is about. It needs to become consumer-friendly.
I'm merely responding to your argument that people will be unwilling to carry the equivalent of their checking account balance (~$1000?) with them because they'll fear for their physical safety. People carry laptops and credit cards despite the fact it's not any harder to point a gun at me and take me to an ATM in a shady part of town or steal my laptop.
Would you make fun of the Burundian Franc because I'd have to convert them into USD to pay my US suppliers? Not everyone has to directly accept Bitcoin for it to be a real currency and generally useful.
The only difference with Bitcoin versus a small fiat currency is the people who are using it are distributed geographically worldwide instead of clumped together in one area. As long as they continue to prefer it to other currencies for some proportion of their transactions it will be successful and have value.
> Would you make fun of the Burundian Franc because I'd have to convert them into USD to pay my US suppliers?
No, if it's a bona fide currency, if you can walk around in Burundi and buy bread or a goat or a gun with it, then of course having to convert it to buy a Macbook isn't a dealbreaker. But Bitcoin is in the opposite situation.
> The only difference with Bitcoin versus a small fiat currency is the people who are using it are distributed geographically worldwide instead of clumped together in one area.
So with a currency you can buy life essentials, with Bitcoin you can buy virtual things or things that are feasible to send through the post. I wonder what is going to be more valuable overall?
