Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.
There are three classic problems that you might encounter if you try to use Bitcoin to pay for goods and services. The first problem is that your Bitcoins might go astray: Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and involve sending money to long complicated addresses, and people are constantly trying to steal them. So if you send someone Bitcoin to pay for something, there will probably be a typo in the address and the person won’t get it and you’ll have to send it again and your first payment will just be permanently lost.
