If you truly don't want to understand mining or how the blockchain protects the integrity of transactions, you can hold off on making cynical assumptions about its design. Early adopters to the network provided the computing power that lets the currency even exist in the first place. They also likely all sold their BTC years ago. The economic output of a few days of mining in 2009 could have never been more than a couple hundred dollars in today's money for even the best miners. In fact it has been a long time since mining had a good ROI, or even a predictable one.

If your deal-breaker is a centralized currency or your preferred economic theory then by all means ignore it, but I don't see how you need to care about its proliferation. Cash has the same properties anyway. Your dismissive/grumpy attitude reminds me of something Gandhi said about ridicule.

I've been ridiculing it since they day I heard about it, rather than going through any sort of ghandi-esque three step process. I took time to understand exactly what it is and decided the crypto was interesting but as a currency it's not something I could ever adopt in good conscience. The rules, set in stone since the beginning, are not a recipe for a good currency.

What's more the Randian/libertarian fanboys provide no end of amusement. The various ponzi schemes and robberies are terrible, and the reaction of the community just as bad.

So to me BTC is an unworkable currency with a toxic community.

You don't have to be a Randian hero to have interest in Bitcoin. Like you said, the cryptography is interesting. We can build scripts and sophisticated contracts and smart property and open transactions, all financial instruments that cannot be violated yet have enormous potential. Distributed bond markets and all of the curious things we can build on top of Bitcoin -- stuff that couldn't _exist_ before Bitcoin.

Imagine the federal reserve releasing their own Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency with their own inflation rates and restrictions. I could see it happening and I think it would be very interesting as well, maybe even more successful than Bitcoin. You do not have to subscribe to some libertarian fantasy to be in awe of what Bitcoin could accomplish. To simply discard all of that because criminal can use it, is a weak and lazy argument. I don't know how you could expect innovation to ever occur with currencies or economies without some growing pains and experiments.

Hell the lead developer of Bitcoin meets with the CIA to tell them how easy it is to track all of the economic activity of Bitcoin. These people are not trying to start a revolution they're trying to build software.

I'm sure the government will save you from the drugs and everything else you're scared of, so don't worry about it.

You didn't read my other comments then, the ones where I said that the illicit use is in BTC's favour in my book? And that my objections to BTC itself are economic?

Never mind, just sling insults about how closed minded and scared everyone is that disagrees with you...

Personally, I don't see Bitcoin replacing nationalized currencies like the USD as a store of value. I just see it as a great way to send and receive payments online. Kind of like PayPal, but decentralized.

For that use-case, it doesn't even matter if the value of BTC continues to fluctuate a lot over the course of weeks, since people only have to hold onto BTC long enough to trade with it, and then they can exchange back into more stable currencies, if they wish.

Sure, there are the Randian/libertarian fanboys, but whatever. They don't have any real control over Bitcoin anyway, and they're not too hard to ignore.