You said "Yes I understand that was BC's whole thing" and "it could be shut off". Get back to white paper and understand why Bitcoin CAN'T be shut of. The same way you can't shut off torrent, email or TCP/IP. Protocols do not die or get "shut down", once invented they are either used or not.

Indeed, if you don't hold the private key, then the bitcoin are not really yours. Paypal can and will prevent some big transaction or some transfer to some company (gambling/sex/drug/weapon/investment/risky business) and some countries blacklisted by the US Gov. But that doesn't affect much Bitcoin. Paypal just add one convenient way to reach thousands of company that will be able to accept it right away.

Bitcoin use the same cryptography that SSL, certificate and most every encryption system (Private & Public key). If you managed to crack this you got a lot more than just bitcoin, you got access to almost everything on the planet. The data inside the blockchain are not encrypted at all, the encryption is only used to prove you're the ownership of an address (so you can transfer the Bitcoin to another).

The good news is that bitcoin has been design so nobody can control it. Good luck with that banks!

I feel it's soo far away to be somehow useful I'm not that excited.

You means Java try to follow C# only adding same features couple years after? C# is open source (http://referencesource.microsoft.com/) both the framework and the compiler and ECMA and ISO standard. Java have none of that. Many companies can develop competing runtime environment (mono) with help of Microsoft while in Java you get sue. http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Of course they are converting it, but if they have a supplier in China that will accept Bitcoin too and they want prefer using Bitcoin to save days and thousands of $ in processing fees. Have you ever done an international wire transfer? It's long and painful while Bitcoin is free and instant. Nobody expected the market to change at once, just like the email didn't remove all fax machines at once, but 1 at the time.

That's a nice starting advantage!

I agree, in todays world, such claim need to be backed by something like a video...

Inflation is the increase of the money supply, this lead to price increase. Bitcoin is great because it is a controlled inflation currency. We all know how many bitcoin are created every 10 minutes and that for the next 100 years. You have no clue how may trillions USD will be printed in the next 10 years.

Since it's a big volume, picking one particular exchange would disturb the price of Bitcoin temporarily. That's why they decided to auction them instead. They could have sold it to the market, but to be wise the would should to sell like 10 BTC per hours unless they willing to go into [bigger] Chinese exchanges... The beauty of bitcoin is that you don't need clearing house, exchange or bank. You can trade them directly.

Yeah soon you won't be able to go on the internet!

Monopoly money can be print a zillion time, making it a bad choice. Bitcoin is limited and controlled... that's why it can be used as a currency. Before saying anything stupid, read how the blockchain, proof or works and distributed decentralized consensus works in Bitcoin and you will understand why it's a great invention.

The second your backed by something, there is an authority. Gold? Who own/store the gold, what if the gold get stolen or seize? Backed by stocks? Who own the stocks, on what market? What about stock owning regulation? No! The idea is to having something you can trade without the paperwork, anywhere to anywhere for anything, from a phone instantly & borderless. If you like a backed currency, try your own and let the Bitcoin experient goes... time will tell!

According to the video you can select the icons and menus you want to display in the toolbar... that include all the addons/plugins/extensions too. What customization has been dropped?