A netizen with a moral conscience! Employ remoralization agents!

+1 You beat me to it.

And in the case of a startup they have a limited amount of their own money with which to fail. Whereas America's CIO has an unlimited amount of someone else's money. What could go wrong?

Somebody sold it to the "speculators" at a profit, they didn't steal it. I notice nobody is so eager to blame speculators when they make money. Also, the price could drop lower should the person who drilled it share in the speculators loss?

Speculators are a tiny minority of investors. You are giving them far too much power.

The purpose of speculators is to be scapegoats for everything that goes wrong when the rest of us buy or sell something. How else would we explain how we lose money?

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present a product of our public education sytem. Two paragraphs of half-thoughts and half-truths summed up with nonsense.

There are decent criticisms of Bitcoin. You somehow missed them all with this rambling.

This is true. In actual usage, the problems of today would be far less pronounced. For example, today if you deposit money in a bank perhaps 20% stays in the bank and the 80% goes out to be reinvested. With transparent transactions, we would know how much money was in the bank account and it would serve as a deterrent to overleverage.

Yes, I'm aware the bank could have limitless accounts and try to obfuscate the information. In practice, everyone knows the account numbers of the exchanges.

Systems don't make money or contribute to society. People do. The problem with the current system is that those same people are able to manipulate it without their knowledge or consent of the rest of us.

Bitcoin addresses a host of failures of the current system by making financial transactions fully transparent. There is an inability to to leverage money 50 to one like Societe Generale taking accounts to the casino. There is an inability to inflate the currency. There is no need for banks since everyone *is* a bank and can conduct global transactions anytime anywhere for free.

It's not perfect, but the current system is broken.

Let me know when they announce the completion.

The total economy would theoretically be worth the ~6 million coins in existence multiplied by $13 USD or $78 million. Penny stocks are not necessarily bad companies, just companies that trade for less than $1. Any company can be a penny stock if they issue enough shares.

Bitcoin isn't necessarily puffing itself up either. It's actually a very good idea. Whether this incarnation is a flash in the pan or not only time will tell, but cryptocurrency is a permanent thing now.