I made three different types of transaction in Bitcoin last night.

First I put $10 cash into a BTC ATM and bought some coins onto a wallet on my phone. This was seamless and fast - a massive contrast from the last time I used a Bitcoin ATM in San Francisco last year. On that occasion I had to scan my passport, my palm print and my face. This time I just inserted a banknote and scanned the QR code of my mobile wallet.

I then bought myself a drink at the bar and paid with Bitcoin. Which was even quicker than buying coins with the ATM. A mobile wallet really is the key to using Bitcoin in the real-world - and this was my first experience of using one. Essentially the sender scans a QR code provided by the recipient and enters the amount to send. The bar I was at had a Galaxy Note as their Bitcoin mechanism. Unfortunately there’s no business case for accepting bitcoin yet - it’s slower and more cumbersome than cash. But certainly on a par with credit cards for ease of use and speed.

My last transaction was to buy some Bitcoin for cash from Felix Weis, who is spending 365 travelling the world using nothing but Bitcoins. This was the least smooth of the transactions as we had to calculate the amount of BTC to transfer for a fixed amount of local currency. Even verbalising amounts of Bitcoin is overly complex. A number like 0.020549201 is almost impossible to articulate. I have no idea where to round it off either to avoid agonising over fractions of a cent, or (even worse) rounding myself out of $10.

It’s important to say though, that none of these transactions was held up by waiting for a confirmation from the Blockchain. This confirmation can take between ten minutes and an hour and basically says that the transaction definitely happened. In the absence of a confirmation, I could have ten friends at ten other bars all sending the same Bitcoin at the same moment. Essentially double-spending. Part of the delay at the Robocoin ATM in San Francisco was waiting for a confirmation on the blockchain.

My feeling is now that Bitcoin and the blockchain has some parallels to email. While email’s core is still sending and receiving messages, it’s at least equally useful as a means of identification and authentication (login). Things like e-ticketing use email but have needed other technology like PDF to come to fruition. For better or worse, identity on the internet is still largely centralised through an email address. Email had some difficult concepts at first, but I’d say the majority of people could now identify an obviously invalid email address. Explaining how to find an @ sign on the keyboard might be compared with showing someone how to scan a QR code.

I still don’t know where Bitcoin’s headed (which is most of the fun). As Felix said to me last night, in five years it will either be a worthless piece of nostalgia or an everyday technology.