nah ethereum is garbage tech.

Unique things that neither gold nor fiat/government money can do: move money globally, instantly in a permissionless way. Hold an asset unseizably and unfreezably.

bitcoin had lower volatility than GBP for much of 2016.

Good will of mathematicians? Err math :) 2+2 = 4 regardless of the mood of mathematicians or their views on your spending choices. Try your claim with metals: Gold is simply a near zero-value metal ingot which a subset of people have agreed has value. Nothing less, nothing more.

After 8.5 years the stories about imminent death of bitcoin gets kind of old - that was the reason people started collecting bitcoin obituaries. Trading strategy: buy and hodl and have a long term investment horizon. Lots of opportunity to average down as low as $200 during the intervening period. Point is if people see a value to permissionless, unseizable global digital gold. From the $16 billion market cap it seems that they do. Feel free not to buy any.

Global political attacks on cash (India http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl..., Pakistan http://www.financialexpress.co..., Venezuela https://www.theguardian.com/wo..., Euro http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...) and gold (India gold ownership limits http://www.indianjobs4u.com/go...) and Euro currency (Italian bank bailout worries http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...), US (geopolitical uncertainty from Trump, interest rate hikes http://abcnews.go.com/Business...), brexit (UK in or out of Europe http://www.express.co.uk/news/...) are all bullish for Bitcoin into 2017.

Refer you to https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin...

I agree. If I had any moderation points I would mod it 5 insightful. This is precisely the problem: copyright & patents. Copyrights are in effect a government subsidy for monopolies. So some people argue actually enforcing monopoly law alone would be enough, and this certainly seems like something that should be illegal under anti-monopoly laws, if anything should.