What people mostly miss is the intrinsic value of the hash power that protects blockchain transactions which is worth about $10 billion. Although the hashing hardware is owned by miners, buying bitcoin gives the owner the right to use the hashing equipment for cheap guaranteed money transfers or to purchase trust by recording transactions on the chain. Although green zealots complain about bitcoin's power consumption at .3% of world power it is a small price to pay for the great cultural achievement of providing automated trust, where for the first time in history one's trust can be placed in a machine rather than a human or human organization.

Why bitcoin changed was because it was discovered to have uses beyond its original intent much like the Internet which was supposed to be just for email and watching porno. Once we found out the blockchain could be used as a general purpose trust anchor for smart contracts in commercial applications having nothing to do with bitcoin or currency, the smart Wall Street money got interested as they visualized all the worlds business paying small bitcoin fees to record proofs of their ordinary business transactions. This seems to be happening as private permission-based blockchains like Factum with weak security post hash proofs on the bitcoin chain for each of their blocks as security back-up.

Bitcoin could not be a Ponzi scheme because 80% of the early adopters' bitcoin hasn't moved in years. It would have been pretty dumb for these "Ponzi creators" to leave $2 billion on the table just when their scheme was paying off as bitcoin hit $20,000. LOL

Yes. Buying crypto currency is like buying stock. There is no guarantee you will get your money back. So what's the problem?

The IRS will know who you are when you bought your bitcoin from a regulated exchange. They can then require you to do a proof-of-stake on your addresses at tax time. The difference between your Bitcoin balances at purchase time and tax time must be accounted for by either sales with capital gains (or losses) or purchases. Innovative blockchain forensic software will follow the money.

According to this poorly written article Slot survived the accident and Tesla still has a perfect record.

Roman Seleznev and his father, the ultra-nationalist Duma deputy Valery Selenev are on the phone. The scene is tense. There are tears.

Roman: "Father, I'm scared. The lawyer told me I could be looking at 20 years in prison. My whole life will be gone. You've got to tell Mr. Putin to help us."
Valery: "Don't worry, Rommie. We'll spin this into an international incident."
Roman: "And there's a big ObCMORMEYbCM6O (Russian for nigger) looking at my tender, plump buttucks."
Valery: "For God's sakes, boy! Pull up your pants."
Roman: "They are up. He's looking at the spot where my juicy, plump ass would be if it weren't covered up."
Valery: "Oh."

In Russia it is legal and even heroic to steal from Americans on the internet. Russia has never extradited for internet crime so let them seethe in their anger that one of their elites had a bag put over his head by the Secret Service and will now spend the rest of his life with a negro cellie whose size and penetrating capacity will soon make him forget about girls. I hope it gives them a heart attack.

I would assume the dogs don't get their treat if the flashes drives are encrypted.

The media and liberals conflate the three issues of-- Is the world warming? Is it human induced? Can human countermeasures have any worthwhile effect?" into one hoping the public will be too dumb to see the difference so that any skepticism about countermeasures like onerous carbon taxes can be shouted down as flat-earth talk. Any intelligent observer of the issue will arrive at the conclusion that the high costs Americans will be asked to pay for certain quantity of carbon reduction will be quickly overwhelmed by India and China opening one new coal fired power plant per week. Americans should be told that the extra $500 per month they will be paying for energy is largely symbolic and designed more to shame the developing world into adopting green energy policies and burnish America's image as a green nation doing its part to combat GW.

Deflation is a problem that can be managed since with universal participation and a liquid market of maybe 100MM buy/sell transactions per day the deflation rate will look something like the the inflation rate of a widely traded currency like the dollar-- 1 or 2% per year, nothing you're going to hoard to make money off of. Bitcoin could just become a token currency where it is held for the purpose of the transaction and then converted into fiat. This would be especially true if the future of the blockchain as a universally used decentralized broker of trust for all manner of transactions ( not just Bitcoin) play out.

We pay the card companies a lot of money for using their network, maintaining a secure ledger of accounts and combating fraud and identity theft, merchants pay 3% of their gross revenue through the transaction fee and the card providers also extract some of this cost from the consumer through high fees and interest. These are costs that suddenly vanish when the merchant accepts Bitcoin (or actually shrink to .1%) since the network is free, the ledger (blockchain) is free and identity fraud is impossible since a Bitcoin wallet cannot be duplicated like a credit card. You can see how merchants who are operating on very thin profit margins (10% or less) see lower transaction costs as a way to substantially make a difference in their bottom line. As a matter of fact, Wall Street sees it too which is why they are investing in Bitcoin infrastructure. My advice to you slashdot holdouts is don't wait too long before you start getting it.

Psst. Don't post success stories. You'll just make the bitcoin skeptics hate it more .