Not entirely correct. The pad can be derived from a seed. Then you only need to transmit the initial seed, the ciphertext and keep track of the offsets.

Name one open source decentralized digital currency not forked from bitcoin.

I believe bitcoin will be worth thousands of dollars in a decade. I've spend thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin just in the last year. Where is your god now?

How does bitcoin require you or anybody else to sign up in order to be a success? I can spend my bitcoins perfectly well without you.

The crash was due to a hacker getting into an account with a large amount of coins. the exchange had a security feature that limited the amount of bitcoins that would be withdrawn. the hacker dumped a large of amount of the bitcoins in the account for .01 to drop the remaining balance of bitcoins below that security bar. The crash was not a loss of confidence, it was due to a security vulnerability in the exchange service (not the bitcoin protocol), a bad decision to keep bitcoins at a third party service, and possibly a weak password.

Good luck with growing your network effect and infrastructure.

The European Central Bank has investigated bitcoin and came to no such conclusion. Are you suggesting that every IPO ever created is a ponzi scheme too? Bitcoin is not a ponzi because you are the sole owner of your commodity and can spend it at any time. It's not required to go on deposit to pay off earlier investors. You own it. Bitcoin is far more useful for payments. Try sending a fleck of gold to pay for a good or service. Not gonna happen, but it's very possible and easy to send a micro or massive payment across the world instantly without fee.

It doesn't have to come to that... this guy makes an interesting observation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XxWGBjGMco

Except that bitcoins are actually scarce compared to all other monetary systems. In fact, bitcoin is the world's first, truly deflationary currency, something your PMs are not. Once 21 million bitcoins have been created, there will absolutely, mathematically provably not be any more. But, we'll always be mining new gold from the earth, other plantets, and through nuclear fusion.

In their initial pre-order offering, you could only pay with bitcoin and bank wire transfer. At some point, they opened up the other options.

Or perhaps they do absolutely believe in bitcion and want it to be as diverse and strong as possible. Their movitivation in this case would not to become the sole owners of a shit ton of bitcoins, but the expidited downfall of other fraudulent currency systems and/or political change. There are people like that.

Uh, every peer in the network is absolutely regulating the network, preventing double spends, ignoring spam, and locking transactions into the ledger. Perhaps you should be the one to review your knowledge of how it works.

Can you at least speculate on a reasonable scenario where the bubble will burst in any measure of time? Because bitcoin has been ending the last 7 months up from each previous month with no sign of slowing down. The market doesn't even flinch when a service built on bitcoin gets hacked. http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/32694107461/september-2012-results

I dont get the hobby reference. You've attached bitpay to your payment processing and you receive money for your sales. How is it not efficient? all you do is accept the sales and dollars are ACH'd into your checking account or your customer doesn't have to type in all the PII or financial data to purchase your stuff. How is it not safe for you? There is no volaliity or charge reversal risk. What exactly are you talking about because none of your statements made any sense.

nobody is going to stop their life and wait for bitcoins to reach 3.3 million each. everyone has their own time line of events that require emergency spending, investments, growth, etc. I'm not going to wait for 3.3 million before I buy my car or groceries, because I need it now. But when I do make that purchase, the appreciation in value bitcoin has made since i started collecting offers me a significant discount on that purchase... a strong incentive for spending. Especially since its so easy to replace them immediately after (dollar cost averaging).