The fact that many countries have mismanaged their finances so badly that a 6 year old software project manages to improve upon things is hardly a critique on Bitcoin. Volatility is part of the process for anything with a small market cap, small user base and drastic swings in public interest.

So Bitcoin has growing pains. What's Argentina's excuse?

Yeah, Bitcoin advocates are getting desperate what with Goldman Sachs and IDG investing the majority of $50m in a payments startup running on top of Bitcoin - you got us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/business/dealbook/goldman-and-idg-put-50-million-to-work-in-a-bitcoin-company.html

Bitcoin is indeed a nice experiment - one that has withstood attacks for 6+ years now. As far as vigorous supporters being few, this is true - however it is a slowly increasing number. Despite the negative press covering thefts and a recent decline in price, Bitcoin transactions per day are at a record high.

http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-daily-transactions/

One thing that Bitcoin detractors like to bring up is comparing BTC against USD with the 'you have to pay your taxes in USD' argument. I have no expectation that BTC replaces USD anytime within the next 20 or more years. However, it doesn't have to - BTC has value because it's more useful than the USD in a number of ways.

BTC is primarily used in manners that push the envelope of allowed activity. This includes illegal activity such as purchasing drugs, credit card data or other such flat out illegal transactions. However, it also includes legal transactions that are merely frowned upon by certain elements of society. As an example, BTC is more useful than the USD/Credit Cards/PayPal in most targeted industries listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Investors may not like it, but this is what gives BTC most of the value it has today.

How exactly would you describe an elegant solution to the nearly 40 year old Byzantine generals problem and not call it an innovation?

This isn't the banking sector - as you can well imagine, no banks are touching Bitcoin directly. The point here is that if regulations are introduced hastily, it'll kill off the innovation. Whether or not everyone thinks that the world has plenty of currencies and doesn't need another isn't really relevant - Bitcoin is a game changing invention that should get a chance to grow into a larger role before regulations crush the entrepreneurial efforts.

Bitcoin can and is being insured as well. After all, it's no harder to protect Bitcoin private keys than say Verisign's root certificates, which are insured against theft as well. And it's still an unfortunate thing that our banks are so susceptible to hacking and theft. After all, whether through increased costs of private insurance or FDIC, we all pay for the losses that a bank incurs.

Instead of the ridiculous $387m in losses, it looks like closer to $8.1m in losses. http://www.coindesk.com/mycoin... As always, reporters are more than happy to run any title that gets hits, regardless of how likely the situation meshes with the facts.

Instead of the ridiculous $387m in losses, it looks like closer to $8.1m in losses, of which Bitcoin is only a marketing tool to make the Ponzi scheme more marketable. http://www.coindesk.com/mycoin... As always, reporters are more than happy to run any title that gets hits, regardless of how likely the situation meshes with the facts.

It's just a regular Ponzi scheme with Bitcoin marketing. All of the investments came from wealthy investors who put up an average of 1M HKD looking for 2-3X return in only a few short months. Sure, the operators of the Ponzi scheme / "exchange" told them that they were going to get bitcoin in return but very few BTC actually flowed to investors. This is not really a Bitcoin story and the calls by HK regulators for banning Bitcoin is both unwarranted and won't stop the problem - there will always be suckers looking for a get rich quick scheme to draw them in, no matter what the medium of exchange may be.

It's 90% paper losses - certainly nothing like 10% of BTC just stolen. You deposit 100K HKD, they tell you that you now have 1M HKD in your account and then it turns out you invested in a ponzi scheme - did you lose 1M HKD? No, just the original 100K since the gains never happened. The press will always choose to not write a story accurately as long as it gets better headlines.

Bitcoin might be flawed or it might just be that it doesn't fit into a box and therefore most people, including Slashdotters reject it out of hand. What do you think about the $400m+ of venture capital invested in Bitcoin infrastructure in the last 18 months? Obviously not all investors share your convictions about the flaws.

Wow - just because it has "Coin" in the name hasn't stopped the CFTC from calling it a commodity. Somehow, I think their opinion matters more than yours does. And seriously, anyone that thinks that someone who deals in tokens produced by unauthorized entities should be jailed just doesn't understand math. Every self-signed certificate is an "unauthorized" item. Anyone that works with prime numbers creates "unauthorized" work. The same holds true for digital works of art. Troll harder, moron.

Sure, lots of me-too clones have cropped up - however, the vast majority of investors/users aren't fooled. Alt-coins make up less than 10% of the market, all combined. Clearly first mover has a ton of advantage in terms of adoption, investment and developer time.

The reason is this - for 4 years running, it has one of the lowest performance impacts on a running system. Does it catch everything? No, but nothing does. Given that AV is imperfect protection, I might as well have a smoothly running system with minimal protection.

Indeed. There were plenty of redeeming qualities from both of the ST reboots. This brings the level of enjoyment to levels that are just impossible with Episode 1-3 - Jar Jar, annoying kids that accidentally blow up space stations, horrible love stories that no one believes, boring plots about trade embargoes and senate votes, etc, etc. And I assume that everyone agrees that ST V is worse than either of the reboots. The point is that while JJ Abrams may be flawed, we have reason to hope that the product will be far superior to the worst that Star Wars has offered us so far. George Lucas has passed the torch and I'm very happy to see him in the rear view mirror.