It might not be that easy. Bitcoin isn't a company, nor a brand, it's a word. Making "Bitcoin" illegal doesn't mean anything. Generalizing the specific technique and putting it in the form of a law however, would have unforeseen consequences and hazardous side-effects.
Nothing about Bitcoin tells you that it's money. It's a distributed notary system that uses proof of work to determine the authenticity of the book and public key cryptograophy to determine the authenticity of entities. It might have existed in this form without being perceived as money. For instance, Namecoin is almost exactly Bitcoin, yet it's only a database and a token system to help exchange entries.
Since outlawing the techniques themselves is almost comical, and would at most result in Bitcoin switching algorithms, they would most likely try to go after the exchange of digital tokens for trade. How would you put this into law? What is the difference between Amazon coins and Bitcoins in that specific aspect?
As a result, the only thing they can do is switch to whitelisting. If you would like to publish a new token, or trade with it, you would have to go to the government and ask for a permission. I'm not saying this won't happen, but you would need to indoctrinate people a little more to guarantee their silence AND obedience about this. You see, if they really hate what you did, the law will have the opposite effect.
One more thing that is noteworthy is that Bitcoin is international, with its true meaning. There are many people in many regions using it. Banning it in the U.S. would only result in moving the exchanges elsewhere. Exchanges already are distributed around the world. For the ban to work, you need a consensus action throughout the world. I'm not saying this won't happen, but what I said above, multiplied.
They are not the same thing, but I don't know how you could with good conscience argue that genocide is worse then indiscriminate killing, or that the ones doing indiscriminate killings are somewhat less guilty than the ones exercising genocide.
How is killing a bunch of people because you think they are evil worse than killing them for sheer personal gain? I can agree that delusion is scarier than psychopathy, but that doesn't make it worse.
Besides, regardless of how baseless it was, Nazi rhetoric included reprisal, so your point doesn't work anyway.
How did you arrive to that conclusion? Bitcoin market is constantly getting bigger. However the price is fluctuating wildly as well. News people love big headlines, that's why you might have read that Bitcoin is dead and then alive again, based on exchange rate.
You have a false assumption. How do you know they aren't keeping the chips? The mold is what costs big time. Producing the chips is very cheap. What I would try to do is, get as much capital as I can, and while filling the orders for quick money, mine at the same time for long term profit. You can even do it in the name of testing.
Second, what you imagine isn't how risk works. You can't just anticipate something and blindly go after that. It's about probabilities. Bitcoin might fail, or it might get very big. As a manufacturer, you can take some advantage of both and come out ahead no matter what. You are in an advantaged position where you don't need to gamble.
Also, "wanting it to succeed" is not the same as believing it will not fail. I think Bitcoin is a very good idea, but that doesn't mean I believe it won't fail. There is a chance that it will and everyone knows that. I personally want such things to succeed in general.
controlled by an elite cabal of basement-dwelling enthusiasts who can afford the thousands of dollars worth of hardware to drive smaller players out
How come basement-dwelling enthusiasts can afford to pay thousands for hardware, but anyone else can't?
How can people with less resources drive out people with more resources? If anything, running an ASIC device you only need to plug in the USB port to run is far easier for smaller players (and people who aren't players at all) than buying and installing multiple graphics cards.
This is a lie. We DO know how to solve such problems for the same reason we know how to predict such problems- we do science.
You know that I was talking about the political situation, not the science. You sure have more faith in the coordination of governments than I do though. If you are suggesting that there is a way to do this without unprecedented centralization, then I'd be sympathetic to that.
CFC's
You are talking about the magnitude of the threat. That's a totally different thing.
Saying "The left lost the battle long ago" is counter productive.
I certainly don't think so. I think the rhetoric would be more effective if it's toned down. We could instead focus on the debate on the precautionary principle itself. But don't take my word for it...
Also I find it laughable you seriously claim you consume legumes based on their carbon footprint. Especially after all that veiled rhetoric of your own.
This is a very good example of the cynicism which allows people to continue with their expensive lifestyles while putting the blame on others. Why take responsibility if others won't? Everyone needs to be enforced top-to-bottom at the same time for this thing to work, doesn't it?
Believe it or not, I sold my car, switched to a vegetarian diet and continue advocating using of food with less production and transportation costs to vegetarians, since most luxury vegetarian food have in fact heavier footprint. One interesting fact is, I'm usually excluded from the topics because they don't like what I say either. What they want to know is that they are doing something good, and meat eaters are doing something bad. Sounds familiar?
I didn't say carbon footprint though, since I made the switch long before I was aware of AGW. It's just a good idea to consume less. My overall footprint is lower than average, though I don't constrain myself too much. I certainly allowed myself to have kids, ethics of which is debatable.
Anyway, call me a liar if it works better for you.
The "right wing" where I live currently, and also my home country, are both FOR central planning. I've never been to the Unites States, so it seems implausible that I somehow became an American-style rightwing nutjob. I certainly don't submit to the right wing ideologies that I know.
However I'm somewhat familiar with the American libertarian stereotype, and I get the reason why the fact that I'm against monopolies somehow give the impression to you that I am totally against central planning.
I instead urge you to read what I'm suggesting with less prejudice.
I'm not black-and-white about central planning. I just don't think monopolies are ever a good idea. A world united under a single state is the ultimate monopoly. There is no point in arguing about the freedom after the singularity.
I also haven't said anything about AGW being wrong. Though, reading all responses to my comment, it's no wonder that there is so much resistance to the AGW rhetoric.
Don't get me wrong, even though I'm not convinced that the civilization will collapse, I don't drive a car if not absolutely necessary, use raw food items most of the time, and try not to consume that much energy overall. I mostly consume dried legumes because they have a very low footprint (transportation and storage included). This is what I understand from the precautionary principle. I don't submit to the totality of AGW rhetoric, nor I need to, in order to do my part.
I'm interested in how you yourself live. Have you changed your life to adapt the situation? Have you moved to a place where you don't have to drive? Or are you waiting for the state to enforce the evil corporations and terrorist regimes before you adopt a role in this?
The left lost the battle long ago, by imagining nightmares and creating religions out of them. I don't intend to challenge science here, but the battle in the political arena is hopeless because the rhetoric doesn't work anymore. If AGW is a fact, this is a fact too. I don't think I need to be a denier to mention it.
I've grown extraordinarily pessimistic that anything can or will be done about climate change at this point, and my only thought at this point is that we just need to enjoy what we can until the inevitable self-inflicted pain and suffering we will endure from its affects.
We don't know how to solve such problems. The extent we can do with our current political technology is to become increasingly centralized to implement and enforce consistent policies. Which is a much bigger nightmare than global warming and would cause more suffering in the long run. Of course we won't call it suffering then, since we will be educated to know better.
I'm pessimistic about our ability to solve this problem, but I'm mildly optimistic about the coping part. We can easily adapt. New technologies will deal with the problems we're likely to face. The worst part would still be the politics of it. There is too much friction in resource allocation, which will make it very hard to help threatened populations. There is even more political friction if you want to relocate them.
Would these issues result in the same kind of centralization? If so, then moving in that direction now would be the lesser evil. It's very hard to reason about.
Short answer: Transactions require fees. Currently, since the transaction count is easily manageable and block reward is high, most miners process the transactions that have very low or no fees. However, as the block reward diminishes, fees will replace them.
Long answer:
Users have the incentive to pay a high fee so that their transactions get into a block. Miners have the incentive to get every transaction they can get into a block to collect the highest total fees, thus accepting lower fees.
The mechanics actually is even more complex, because there is less incentive to use Bitcoin if the fees get too high, which would cause the value of coins to get lower, which would in turn decrease the mining incentive, thereby decelerating the increase in difficulty, which would reduce mining costs, which would cause the fees to go lower.
So the commonly accepted fee will be at the equilibrium. Since the Bitcoin economy (at least as it is currently) has a very low friction, the equilibrium is rapidly reached.
One concern is how the standard will be extended from now on. We don't want a centralized authority to dictate block sizes and whatnot, but we don't want it to become too hard to develop the system to fix problems. Hopefully the open source philosophy will help us there.
It's getting more stable lately, but there is still very high volatility risk.
However, I don't think it poses a critical problem if you are considering it as a payment system, rather than an investment vehicle. You could convert a portion of the payment to your local currency, either on the fly or periodically. There are companies that can make the on-the-fly conversion for you and send you the money via conventional banking.
Directly, on the positive side, it would pretty much kill some religions, or at least transform them into less harmful variants that don't preach that humans are unique and masters of everything.
Religious belief routes around damage. They find a way to believe in the same eventual thing they always do.
Indirectly, it would likely renew interest in space exploration, which I think might benefit us all, and especially our descendants and their chance of survival.
Hell yes! I think discovery of intelligent life outside Earth would completely change how we operate as humanity.
That's a pretty good definition of darknet. You are probably confusing it with its newly invented colloquial meaning. Darknets don't have exit nodes, so your parent is right. That would be an open net (at least the relevant, exposed part) regardless of how "dark" you feel about it.
Second, RetroShare is a darknet-ish thing, it doesn't function like TOR. I'm guessing the term "exit node" was misused in the article. It's not exactly a darknet, you can directly connect to your friends' friends and so on, so maybe they are referring to the unsolicited relaying of data to these third parties.
The purist's desktop always "just works" in Linux. Instead of drowning in all the clutter, you could just switch to evilwm or something similar. Typing commands instead of selecting them from a menu is faster anyway (and you can install a pop-up menu for that if you're into that sort of thing). I've been using XMonad for years now and I'm happier and more productive than before. What is it with people's work that requires a "desktop" or "windows that are smaller than the screen that block the others so that you can't exactly see them" or "menu bars"? I don't seem to get what all the fuss is about, even though I've used those sort of systems for years. I have my status bar though, and a little command prompt with nifty completion that I use to run programs. I will be using the same system 5 years later too and it will not introduce any disadvantages.
Bitcoins can't be created by anyone on a whim, they are not issued by any authority other than the authority given to the entity who solves a block. The system imitates gold, with the exception that the total mining rate is also predefined. If you get them stolen, you have to replace them by buying/mining/earning new ones.
That is why vegans ends up so thin and crazy, to get necessary nutrients, the body starts to break down muscle and brain tissue.
I'm sort of skeptical about this claim since I haven't seen anything supporting it in my life or in literature. I don't know why it would even happen. I don't know which nutrient you can't get plenty of through a vegan diet. Do you know? I know vegans that are fitter, stronger and smarter than me. I know vegans that are less smart than me too (they are still fitter). Though I know a lot of people who aren't vegan that aren't very bright, so it's hard do measure the difference.
People who accept fringe norms are more likely to be or appear to be "crazy". This is to be expected. I think the causality is the inverse of what you think.:-)
Humans require B12 which can only be obtained from animals.
That's not entirely true. Animals don't produce B12, it is produced by single celled organisms that are omnipresent in nature. Animals consume it while eating vegetables because they don't wash them. We do, and that's why we can't get enough of it through an ordinary vegan diet. If we lived in nature, we would. So the supplement a vegan needs to get is something that is previously removed from the food source.
Yes, I admit that it will likely take more time to go away than I thought back in the day. However, in the new state of affairs, it's also non-existent in many aspects of life and business, and it seems likely to me that it will be made disappear right after we reach its supposed irrelevancy. It has already been de jure disabled for some purposes. It's illegal to carry cash physically through borders. In my home country, it's illegal to transact some forms of payments (like rent for instance) by cash.
To keep it brief, I think it's in our best interest to have a decentralized alternative, where a centralized solution exists. It doesn't have to take over, but it's our duty to support its existence.
Below is my honest personal point of view. Whether I'm misguided is up to you.
I was pondering about and hoping for something like Bitcoin for the last 15 years, since I realized that cash would go away one day and with it most of my freedoms. It's not about what I do with cash. As long as cash exists as an option, no one actually needs to even use it, it will still serve as a restraint for foci of power.
By "like Bitcoin", I don't mean a fixed supply, proof-of-work based P2P Internet currency. What I mean is, a way to transfer value between two remote parties without involving any intermediary authority. I wasn't thinking a new currency would even be necessary. I liked the Ripple concept very much, but it will never work on a global scale, at least in the current state of the world.
Therefore in my humble mind, my central concern is so important, and a solution like Bitcoin is so brilliant that your list of immediate concerns seem like little wrinkles to me. I'll try to address them one by one.
Anonymity: There is this thing called "provably untraceable transactions", and I think it is somehow seen as an alternative to Bitcoin's model, but actually it isn't (for one, it is also susceptible to traffic analysis, etc. and requires central authority). Total transparency and proof of work is the only proven way of doing this thing without central authority, and in practice it provides *more* reliable privacy than provably untraceable transactions with central authority. I think Bitcoin, as a currency, need not support anonymity by itself; the system is flexible enough that this is actually not a very important concern. You can use any one of the systems built on top of Bitcoin that will provide the untraceability that you require anyway. You must realize that what I'm saying fully conforms with the reality that none of the numerous Bitcoin heists have ever led the investigators to any suspect.
Scalability: This is an argument from lack of imagination. Even now there are several proposed solutions to the foreseen scalability issues. Maybe they won't work. Maybe better solutions will be available soon. Who knows? I don't know of any facts that would make it impossible or even implausible to scale. It just doesn't scale if you leave the protocol as it is.
Geek drug thing: It's hardly surprising that Bitcoin is mostly used in ways it provides more utility. This resembles a lot of the arguments against Linux when it first became widely used in geek circles.
Goldbug people: Yeah, I guess it's not surprising that they're attracted either. I think that's an American thing, and Americans seem to be the earliest to adopt marginal stuff. Also, those people are very vocal (almost only in English platform though), and I doubt they even form a majority of the English-speaking Bitcoin community.
Exchanges hacked: Because they aren't run by professionals. If you could remotely access a bank's all databases, you could mess it up just the same. But you can't. It's not about Bitcoin as a currency, but a problem with Bitcoin as a movement. It will be a "wild west" thing until enough resources are allocated to these services. Why not help Bitcoin reach that point instead of complaining?
Slashdot Mirror
All it takes is the stroke of a pen.
It might not be that easy. Bitcoin isn't a company, nor a brand, it's a word. Making "Bitcoin" illegal doesn't mean anything. Generalizing the specific technique and putting it in the form of a law however, would have unforeseen consequences and hazardous side-effects.
Nothing about Bitcoin tells you that it's money. It's a distributed notary system that uses proof of work to determine the authenticity of the book and public key cryptograophy to determine the authenticity of entities. It might have existed in this form without being perceived as money. For instance, Namecoin is almost exactly Bitcoin, yet it's only a database and a token system to help exchange entries.
Since outlawing the techniques themselves is almost comical, and would at most result in Bitcoin switching algorithms, they would most likely try to go after the exchange of digital tokens for trade. How would you put this into law? What is the difference between Amazon coins and Bitcoins in that specific aspect?
As a result, the only thing they can do is switch to whitelisting. If you would like to publish a new token, or trade with it, you would have to go to the government and ask for a permission. I'm not saying this won't happen, but you would need to indoctrinate people a little more to guarantee their silence AND obedience about this. You see, if they really hate what you did, the law will have the opposite effect.
One more thing that is noteworthy is that Bitcoin is international, with its true meaning. There are many people in many regions using it. Banning it in the U.S. would only result in moving the exchanges elsewhere. Exchanges already are distributed around the world. For the ban to work, you need a consensus action throughout the world. I'm not saying this won't happen, but what I said above, multiplied.
You won't though. You may even cry "It's a fake site, full of frauds!!!!", but you definitely won't read it.
I hope looking down on people gives you enough pleasure to justify the harm your cynicism is causing.
Disclaimer: I have no doubts that climate change is happening and CO2 plays some role in that change.
They are not the same thing, but I don't know how you could with good conscience argue that genocide is worse then indiscriminate killing, or that the ones doing indiscriminate killings are somewhat less guilty than the ones exercising genocide.
How is killing a bunch of people because you think they are evil worse than killing them for sheer personal gain? I can agree that delusion is scarier than psychopathy, but that doesn't make it worse.
Besides, regardless of how baseless it was, Nazi rhetoric included reprisal, so your point doesn't work anyway.
How did you arrive to that conclusion? Bitcoin market is constantly getting bigger. However the price is fluctuating wildly as well. News people love big headlines, that's why you might have read that Bitcoin is dead and then alive again, based on exchange rate.
You have a false assumption. How do you know they aren't keeping the chips? The mold is what costs big time. Producing the chips is very cheap. What I would try to do is, get as much capital as I can, and while filling the orders for quick money, mine at the same time for long term profit. You can even do it in the name of testing.
Second, what you imagine isn't how risk works. You can't just anticipate something and blindly go after that. It's about probabilities. Bitcoin might fail, or it might get very big. As a manufacturer, you can take some advantage of both and come out ahead no matter what. You are in an advantaged position where you don't need to gamble.
Also, "wanting it to succeed" is not the same as believing it will not fail. I think Bitcoin is a very good idea, but that doesn't mean I believe it won't fail. There is a chance that it will and everyone knows that. I personally want such things to succeed in general.
controlled by an elite cabal of basement-dwelling enthusiasts who can afford the thousands of dollars worth of hardware to drive smaller players out
How come basement-dwelling enthusiasts can afford to pay thousands for hardware, but anyone else can't?
How can people with less resources drive out people with more resources? If anything, running an ASIC device you only need to plug in the USB port to run is far easier for smaller players (and people who aren't players at all) than buying and installing multiple graphics cards.
We don't know how to solve such problems.
This is a lie. We DO know how to solve such problems for the same reason we know how to predict such problems- we do science.
You know that I was talking about the political situation, not the science. You sure have more faith in the coordination of governments than I do though. If you are suggesting that there is a way to do this without unprecedented centralization, then I'd be sympathetic to that.
CFC's
You are talking about the magnitude of the threat. That's a totally different thing.
Saying "The left lost the battle long ago" is counter productive.
I certainly don't think so. I think the rhetoric would be more effective if it's toned down. We could instead focus on the debate on the precautionary principle itself. But don't take my word for it...
Also I find it laughable you seriously claim you consume legumes based on their carbon footprint. Especially after all that veiled rhetoric of your own.
This is a very good example of the cynicism which allows people to continue with their expensive lifestyles while putting the blame on others. Why take responsibility if others won't? Everyone needs to be enforced top-to-bottom at the same time for this thing to work, doesn't it?
Believe it or not, I sold my car, switched to a vegetarian diet and continue advocating using of food with less production and transportation costs to vegetarians, since most luxury vegetarian food have in fact heavier footprint. One interesting fact is, I'm usually excluded from the topics because they don't like what I say either. What they want to know is that they are doing something good, and meat eaters are doing something bad. Sounds familiar?
I didn't say carbon footprint though, since I made the switch long before I was aware of AGW. It's just a good idea to consume less. My overall footprint is lower than average, though I don't constrain myself too much. I certainly allowed myself to have kids, ethics of which is debatable.
Anyway, call me a liar if it works better for you.
Silly rightwing nutjob.
The "right wing" where I live currently, and also my home country, are both FOR central planning. I've never been to the Unites States, so it seems implausible that I somehow became an American-style rightwing nutjob. I certainly don't submit to the right wing ideologies that I know.
However I'm somewhat familiar with the American libertarian stereotype, and I get the reason why the fact that I'm against monopolies somehow give the impression to you that I am totally against central planning.
I instead urge you to read what I'm suggesting with less prejudice.
You lost me on the drowning part.
I'm not black-and-white about central planning. I just don't think monopolies are ever a good idea. A world united under a single state is the ultimate monopoly. There is no point in arguing about the freedom after the singularity.
I also haven't said anything about AGW being wrong. Though, reading all responses to my comment, it's no wonder that there is so much resistance to the AGW rhetoric.
Don't get me wrong, even though I'm not convinced that the civilization will collapse, I don't drive a car if not absolutely necessary, use raw food items most of the time, and try not to consume that much energy overall. I mostly consume dried legumes because they have a very low footprint (transportation and storage included). This is what I understand from the precautionary principle. I don't submit to the totality of AGW rhetoric, nor I need to, in order to do my part.
I'm interested in how you yourself live. Have you changed your life to adapt the situation? Have you moved to a place where you don't have to drive? Or are you waiting for the state to enforce the evil corporations and terrorist regimes before you adopt a role in this?
The left lost the battle long ago, by imagining nightmares and creating religions out of them. I don't intend to challenge science here, but the battle in the political arena is hopeless because the rhetoric doesn't work anymore. If AGW is a fact, this is a fact too. I don't think I need to be a denier to mention it.
I've grown extraordinarily pessimistic that anything can or will be done about climate change at this point, and my only thought at this point is that we just need to enjoy what we can until the inevitable self-inflicted pain and suffering we will endure from its affects.
We don't know how to solve such problems. The extent we can do with our current political technology is to become increasingly centralized to implement and enforce consistent policies. Which is a much bigger nightmare than global warming and would cause more suffering in the long run. Of course we won't call it suffering then, since we will be educated to know better.
I'm pessimistic about our ability to solve this problem, but I'm mildly optimistic about the coping part. We can easily adapt. New technologies will deal with the problems we're likely to face. The worst part would still be the politics of it. There is too much friction in resource allocation, which will make it very hard to help threatened populations. There is even more political friction if you want to relocate them.
Would these issues result in the same kind of centralization? If so, then moving in that direction now would be the lesser evil. It's very hard to reason about.
Short answer: Transactions require fees. Currently, since the transaction count is easily manageable and block reward is high, most miners process the transactions that have very low or no fees. However, as the block reward diminishes, fees will replace them.
Long answer:
Users have the incentive to pay a high fee so that their transactions get into a block. Miners have the incentive to get every transaction they can get into a block to collect the highest total fees, thus accepting lower fees.
The mechanics actually is even more complex, because there is less incentive to use Bitcoin if the fees get too high, which would cause the value of coins to get lower, which would in turn decrease the mining incentive, thereby decelerating the increase in difficulty, which would reduce mining costs, which would cause the fees to go lower.
So the commonly accepted fee will be at the equilibrium. Since the Bitcoin economy (at least as it is currently) has a very low friction, the equilibrium is rapidly reached.
One concern is how the standard will be extended from now on. We don't want a centralized authority to dictate block sizes and whatnot, but we don't want it to become too hard to develop the system to fix problems. Hopefully the open source philosophy will help us there.
It's getting more stable lately, but there is still very high volatility risk.
However, I don't think it poses a critical problem if you are considering it as a payment system, rather than an investment vehicle. You could convert a portion of the payment to your local currency, either on the fly or periodically. There are companies that can make the on-the-fly conversion for you and send you the money via conventional banking.
Directly, on the positive side, it would pretty much kill some religions, or at least transform them into less harmful variants that don't preach that humans are unique and masters of everything.
Religious belief routes around damage. They find a way to believe in the same eventual thing they always do.
Indirectly, it would likely renew interest in space exploration, which I think might benefit us all, and especially our descendants and their chance of survival.
Hell yes! I think discovery of intelligent life outside Earth would completely change how we operate as humanity.
Okay, two things...
That's a pretty good definition of darknet. You are probably confusing it with its newly invented colloquial meaning. Darknets don't have exit nodes, so your parent is right. That would be an open net (at least the relevant, exposed part) regardless of how "dark" you feel about it.
Second, RetroShare is a darknet-ish thing, it doesn't function like TOR. I'm guessing the term "exit node" was misused in the article. It's not exactly a darknet, you can directly connect to your friends' friends and so on, so maybe they are referring to the unsolicited relaying of data to these third parties.
Umm, like how they did with the BitTorrent network? If you think about it though, distributed hash table is indeed more vapor-like than trackers...
The purist's desktop always "just works" in Linux. Instead of drowning in all the clutter, you could just switch to evilwm or something similar. Typing commands instead of selecting them from a menu is faster anyway (and you can install a pop-up menu for that if you're into that sort of thing). I've been using XMonad for years now and I'm happier and more productive than before. What is it with people's work that requires a "desktop" or "windows that are smaller than the screen that block the others so that you can't exactly see them" or "menu bars"? I don't seem to get what all the fuss is about, even though I've used those sort of systems for years. I have my status bar though, and a little command prompt with nifty completion that I use to run programs. I will be using the same system 5 years later too and it will not introduce any disadvantages.
Yeah, currency is make-believe by its nature, there is no way around that. But we can still change who makes it or what to believe.
Bitcoins can't be created by anyone on a whim, they are not issued by any authority other than the authority given to the entity who solves a block. The system imitates gold, with the exception that the total mining rate is also predefined. If you get them stolen, you have to replace them by buying/mining/earning new ones.
Okay, agreed.
That is why vegans ends up so thin and crazy, to get necessary nutrients, the body starts to break down muscle and brain tissue.
I'm sort of skeptical about this claim since I haven't seen anything supporting it in my life or in literature. I don't know why it would even happen. I don't know which nutrient you can't get plenty of through a vegan diet. Do you know? I know vegans that are fitter, stronger and smarter than me. I know vegans that are less smart than me too (they are still fitter). Though I know a lot of people who aren't vegan that aren't very bright, so it's hard do measure the difference.
People who accept fringe norms are more likely to be or appear to be "crazy". This is to be expected. I think the causality is the inverse of what you think. :-)
Humans require B12 which can only be obtained from animals.
That's not entirely true. Animals don't produce B12, it is produced by single celled organisms that are omnipresent in nature. Animals consume it while eating vegetables because they don't wash them. We do, and that's why we can't get enough of it through an ordinary vegan diet. If we lived in nature, we would. So the supplement a vegan needs to get is something that is previously removed from the food source.
Yes, I admit that it will likely take more time to go away than I thought back in the day. However, in the new state of affairs, it's also non-existent in many aspects of life and business, and it seems likely to me that it will be made disappear right after we reach its supposed irrelevancy. It has already been de jure disabled for some purposes. It's illegal to carry cash physically through borders. In my home country, it's illegal to transact some forms of payments (like rent for instance) by cash.
To keep it brief, I think it's in our best interest to have a decentralized alternative, where a centralized solution exists. It doesn't have to take over, but it's our duty to support its existence.
Below is my honest personal point of view. Whether I'm misguided is up to you.
I was pondering about and hoping for something like Bitcoin for the last 15 years, since I realized that cash would go away one day and with it most of my freedoms. It's not about what I do with cash. As long as cash exists as an option, no one actually needs to even use it, it will still serve as a restraint for foci of power.
By "like Bitcoin", I don't mean a fixed supply, proof-of-work based P2P Internet currency. What I mean is, a way to transfer value between two remote parties without involving any intermediary authority. I wasn't thinking a new currency would even be necessary. I liked the Ripple concept very much, but it will never work on a global scale, at least in the current state of the world.
Therefore in my humble mind, my central concern is so important, and a solution like Bitcoin is so brilliant that your list of immediate concerns seem like little wrinkles to me. I'll try to address them one by one.
Anonymity: There is this thing called "provably untraceable transactions", and I think it is somehow seen as an alternative to Bitcoin's model, but actually it isn't (for one, it is also susceptible to traffic analysis, etc. and requires central authority). Total transparency and proof of work is the only proven way of doing this thing without central authority, and in practice it provides *more* reliable privacy than provably untraceable transactions with central authority. I think Bitcoin, as a currency, need not support anonymity by itself; the system is flexible enough that this is actually not a very important concern. You can use any one of the systems built on top of Bitcoin that will provide the untraceability that you require anyway. You must realize that what I'm saying fully conforms with the reality that none of the numerous Bitcoin heists have ever led the investigators to any suspect.
Scalability: This is an argument from lack of imagination. Even now there are several proposed solutions to the foreseen scalability issues. Maybe they won't work. Maybe better solutions will be available soon. Who knows? I don't know of any facts that would make it impossible or even implausible to scale. It just doesn't scale if you leave the protocol as it is.
Geek drug thing: It's hardly surprising that Bitcoin is mostly used in ways it provides more utility. This resembles a lot of the arguments against Linux when it first became widely used in geek circles.
Goldbug people: Yeah, I guess it's not surprising that they're attracted either. I think that's an American thing, and Americans seem to be the earliest to adopt marginal stuff. Also, those people are very vocal (almost only in English platform though), and I doubt they even form a majority of the English-speaking Bitcoin community.
Exchanges hacked: Because they aren't run by professionals. If you could remotely access a bank's all databases, you could mess it up just the same. But you can't. It's not about Bitcoin as a currency, but a problem with Bitcoin as a movement. It will be a "wild west" thing until enough resources are allocated to these services. Why not help Bitcoin reach that point instead of complaining?
Pirate: Maddoff. Not a Bitcoin thing at all.
Delusionary value: Money is such a thing, mate.
Summary suggests wind. Makes sense.