I think it's very short-sighted to believe bitcoin would ever be used by itself as a form of digital currency. It's worth a high enough value already (and continues to trend upwards) that it's very inconvenient to use to pay for smaller items or more inexpensive services. (Nobody likes to work with numbers multiple digits to the right of the decimal place.)

That's the whole point of Bitcoin, isn't it?

The status of copyright laws anywhere is ridiculous. Any law firm can send out threatening letters, literally saying "pay us X currency units or we will take you to court". It's like the Mob.

So with the current market, why would someone spend bitcoins? They can wait a day and spend less coins for the same goods, or wait two days and possibly spend even less.

All currencies are volatile to some extent, but this thing has no fundamentals to back it up.

The police pulled a guy over, smelled pot, searched his car, and found a hidden compartment. Not necessarily an open and shut case, but not "absurd" like some describe it.

I see the complaint about Bitcoin transaction history all the time in these stories. From what I can gather, there are two downsides: theoretical loss of anonymity and data storage.

So, is it impossible for Bitcoin to eventually support some form of transaction truncation, where a chunk of transactions are authenticated and then replaced with a detail-losing marker?

At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.

It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshi's paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.

Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.

The primary limiting factor in Bitcoin's performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.

Wasnt the whole point that people wanted an unregulated currency with no government involvement?

Silly, but it is their right... They own the copyright and that's that.

Why is LGBT where the limit should be and no further? Again, it's not my thing, but I honestly don't care if people want to be in a polygamous marriage. If that makes them happy, great. But I don't want to hear about how I have to support it or something's wrong with me.

So you're saying that countries should have no control over their own borders, and who is allowed into the country?

But, one big problem I see with this, is likely that you will be giving your fucking phone number to every website you want to log onto using this.

Let's mandate an inferior standard and kill a superior standard so everyone can be the same on paper.