[austerity]

Oh, come on, let's not pretend this is somehow different from the traditional money. I am not particularly ignorant nor reluctant to learn as far as an average person on the street goes and I have no friggin idea how the mechanisms that govern it really work and cannot appreciate the risks. (Nor really can the experts it seems.)

It's the basic reality of human existence that we have to get by without having pretty much any control of the complex world around us. Bitcoin may fail any time and as a casual user you cannot help it and cannot predict it. But you can go buy some drugs with it right now without having to roam shady streets and it's all that really matters.

[sbuttgereit]

Risk arising from technical implementation details are very different than risks arising from aspects of human nature. One could look at the housing market in 2006/2007 and know that something was very wrong without understanding all of the underlying details: home appreciation, the kinds of loans offered and who was getting them, etc. ... all without understanding details of credit default swaps and the like. One can also have a sense, without specialized knowledge, of how human nature may influence policies and financial decisions. That doesn't mean everyone has access, but a reasonably astute observer without specialized knowledge can at least see that "something is wrong" even if they can't tell you why or how exactly. This is not true with crypto-currencies. Why the transaction processing scaling problems? The decisions are much more abstract and the impacts can be removed in time and have to do with the way math works rather than a human decision.