That's much harder to do with governments controlling fiat money. Or with banks. What is a person supposed to do, who is denied financial transactions by the established financial service providers (paypal, credit cards,...)? There have now been several cases where paypal and others have tried to silence people by cancelling their accounts. What can you do, in the traditional banking world?

And many complaints are not about things Bitcoin actually promises to do. It doesn't promise to make exchanges safe.

The environmental impact is a concern. Miner power perhaps not so much. For example mining hardware coming from one company doesn't seem that bad - you can simply verify the transactions the miners find before sending them out to the network.

Edit: For clarity, yes, I understand that there is a finite amount of Bitcoin that can be mined. I'm talking about the value of what's constantly being mined. The US would never use Bitcoin as a currency when other countries already have more of it than we do.

This may be a misplaced example but I think Star Trek is a decent analogy. Money becomes worthless once replicators are invented in that universe because you can just make more of whatever you need. If China can just mine more Bitcoin than the average citizen of any other country, then China starts to determine what the value of that currency is. It's one of the main reasons why I don't think Bitcoin will ever replace fiat currency. It's already being exploited.

With Bitcoin, the maximum number of Bitcoins that will ever exist is fixed.

It doesn't really matter who mines them. Of course at the moment, indeed, new Bitcoins are mined all the time, but the timeline for the future is clear.

Whether it is a good thing, I don't know. There are a lot of weird aspects about it.

As for China - sure, some miners will accumulate a lot of BTC. But they can only affect the price by selling or not selling it. If they wouldn't mine the BTC, somebody else would. It doesn't really give them that much more power, except for monetary power.

It's probably true that right now there are several people or entities who could crash the Bitcoin price by simply selling off all their BTC. That's not very reassuring.

On the other hand, such a crash could also be a chance to distribute BTC more evenly. It would actually be in the interest of the rich BTC people, too, as it would lead to more adaption and hence more value and stability.

Distribution is a hard problem.

There are several problems with crypto, but they are also interesting, and smart people are trying to solve them. At least it is fun, even if it is unclear if it will be worthwhile in the end.

What about government supported fiat money implemented with blockchain? The best way to implement that would be to preserve as many of the attributes of blockchain as possible. So the government could take coins in their possession out of circulation, or change mining parameters to print more money. Perhaps they could even print money just by signing it. However, they would not be able to make money disappear out of other party's accounts.

And many complaints are not about things Bitcoin actually promises to do. It doesn't promise to make exchanges safe.

Is it really viable not to have safe exchanges?

Not sure how that would supposedly work.

There is one interesting application of government, though: the distribution of the coins. That is what all the cryptocoins struggle with. A government could give every citizen an equal amount of coins, because they have a database of people.

"Is it really viable not to have safe exchanges?"

Some would say that they don't need exchanges, they want to be able to pay everything with Bitcoin. So they wouldn't need fiat money.

Apart from that, exchanges can be at least as safe as banks or traditional stock exchanges. I am mostly using one that is associated with a bank, in fact.

Fiat money rarely becomes utterly worthless. Even Zimbabwe currency, unbelievably inflated, is still worth a marginal amount as a collectible.

Blockchain currencies have gone from something to nothing in seconds.

The technology is obviously not a scam. At most it could turn out that it has technical flaws, like the crypto algorithms could be broken or whatever.

People selling you Bitcoin or making you promises about Bitoin might well be scammers. But that's not the same thing.

Worthless fiat money: it seems to happen a lot, actually. I have a couple of Billion Reichsmarks I could show you. I don't think Zimbabwe $ are worth enough to support your argument.

Of course to use Bitcoin, you have to trust that it will have or keep some value. In that sense, yes, you are back to trust.

When Zimbabwe blew up their money the bills themselves still had marginal utility as wallpaper or as collectibles. Collectively these bills are probably worth millions because there were so many of them.

If you have any Reichmarks around they're actually worth a fair bit considering they're not legal tender. Bills on eBay go for $5 or more depending on their condition, coins for far more. This is almost a hundred years after the implosion of the currency.

Zimbabwe and the Reichmark are extremely rare events. There are hundreds of countries in the world and every decade one or two might suffer from out of control inflation.

Bitcoin may well be a scam. We can't prove it isn't because the creator(s) remain unknown and their intent is based entirely on speculation.

I assure you that Bitcoin physical memorabilia will be worth infinitely more than Bitcoin itself within twenty years. A single shirt or mouse pad will be worth more than the entire market cap of Bitcoin.

I'll check the value of the Reichsmark, but again, I suspect the market is limited.

Network going down: in theory you could keep it up with a Raspberry Pie, so I suppose somebody will. Although I don't know if all the mining hardware out there would make it nonviable (as anybody could start a mining attack with such mining hardware, against a Pie).

As for proving Bitcoin isn't a scam: we don't need the inventor or their plans, we have the implementations of it. That can be validated, as much as possible. I'd argue that if it still has flaws, then they weren't because of scamming, but because of technical issues nobody could foresee.

Edit: they seem to be selling notes of one billion Reichsmark for 1€ on ebay (here in Germany). Not really worth the effort.

I don't mean it "goes offline", I mean that the blockchain is compromised by a 51% attack or something worse and the whole thing can't be trusted, so nobody cares about it at all.

Don't sea lion.

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

The "Just Asking Questions" faux civility is sometimes referred to as JAQing off.

Is that some kind of hyper progressive safe space thing?

Please explain. I'd like to be a good citizen.

"You know nothing, your opinion is invalid" is a classic "crypto" talking point.

"You don't understand Bitcoin," they shriek while failing to comprehend the precarious position their beloved asset is in. "Bitcoin can't have bubbles, it's mathematically impossible," yell their cheerleaders.

And I question your claim about enthusiastic people being the least informed. I'd say the people who work on it and dedicate their lives to improving the infrastructure are both enthusiastic and informed. Of course there are also enthusiastic people who are misinformed.

Actually working on issues might work better, and might also not be easy.

Not really, no. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a fairly popular psychotherapeutic approach that makes use of mindfulness. The objective of ACT is to move patients towards valued behaviour and a meaningful life. In order to achieve that, it uses mindfulness practice to facilitate acceptance of distressing internal experiences and re-orient the patient towards the present moment.

It's very easy to say "just do stuff that matters to you", but there are all sorts of internal obstacles to that. Some people are very anxious and find it more comfortable to avoid new experiences, even if those experiences might ultimately be rewarding. Some people are lacking in confidence and assume that they'll fail at anything they try. Some people are so overwhelmed by emotional pain that they struggle to just get out of bed in the morning. Some people are stuck in self-destructive habits that temporarily soothe their distress but worsen the circumstances that contribute to their distress.

Mindfulness doesn't fix a crappy life, but it's a useful tool. If you can observe your anxious thoughts as just thoughts passing through your mind, you might give them a bit less credence. If you can learn to sit with your distress and tolerate it, you might be a bit less likely to have that drink or distract yourself with a video game or cut your wrists. If you can learn to focus more on the present moment, you might worry a bit less about whether you'll succeed or fail and take a bit more pleasure in the experience of trying.

Isn't that basically the job of children, and has always been?

Not to denounce the efforts to improve their mental health. Just saying some struggle seems normal and unavoidable, probably even necessary.

What it might do is stop children killing themselves as a result of adversity.

Rates of death by suicide in the UK have been declining recently, but not for young people. We also know that rates of self-harm for young people are increasing, and self harm is a significant predictor of death by suicide.

Assuming suicides are usually a result of violence (bullying by peers, pressure by parents and teachers...). Wouldn't it be better to show practical ways out of it? Saying "I'm so great and thankful" while bullies pounce on you might feel rather hollow quickly?

Don't get me wrong, this seems to be set up as an experiment, which seems like a good thing. Maybe they'll find it will actually help.

Your argument sounds like "something has to be done, because..." - but something is not always the right thing.

In any case the AI could make several educated guesses on how good the band is. Quality of the venue would be another indicator.

There are actually still bookstores and other stores around to this day, in most regions.

As for taxes, that is another debate, but I don't see how Amazon paying more taxes would prevent people from working for Amazon?

Even small businesses may have several ways of reducing taxes?

What is the minimum income for considering the "What is the Double Irish With A Dutch Sandwich" or whatever is the tax avoidance hype of the day?

For babies, I am not sure what to think. Who watches 1 hour of movies with their baby? Were they really able to disentangle that from all other factors (socioeconomic status and so on)?