[rahulkapil]

Fail to see how is Bitcoin fragile. It has been running non stop for past 8 years churning out a block every 10 minutes without fail while being under constant attack from hackers, governments, it has its own internal governance issues, hard forks, technical issues, scaling debates. And yet it is growing in liquidity and scale. I doubt state actors can do anything about it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I doubt state actors can do anything about it

This attitude is what I see as Bitcoin's primary risk factory. It's a culture of arrogance that reminds me of pre-crisis finance, when it was popular to say things like "the Federal Reserve chairman is more powerful than the U.S President."

[lukevdp]

He's saying it's fragile in that the US Government could ban it and the value of the coin disappears overnight.

It's very easy to ban - make it illegal to sell Bitcoin, force ISPs to block international sites that do.

[rahulkapil]

Actually it is not that easy to ban.

The Bitcoin code is open source. Anyone from anywhere can download the code and run a local copy. Your coins are securely stored across computers all over the world. Your balance cannot be frozen by any authority. Maybe central exchanges that convert fiat to Bitcoin could be regulated, but mining cannot be stopped, transactions cannot be stopped. Unless governments all over the world shut down electricity and internet.

At that point question mark is on the government that does this rather than Bitcoin.

[samsonradu]

> Your coins are securely stored across computers all over the world.

Please lets not start this debate. Times and times again it has been proven that software is not secure. OpenSSL was also thought to be secure for quite some time too..

[XR0CSWV3h3kZWg]

Agreed. In this case there is an implicit, very large, bug bounty that anyone can cash in. So far there has been one creation of new bitcoin bug and zero spending other people's bitcoin bugs.

That does not mean it's secure, but at this point it's looking more secure every day.

[samsonradu]

The more centralized bitcoin becomes, and it will, the more vulnerable it will be. As time goes by a few exchanges will become huge BTC storage centers. What if it’s an inside attack and someone steals the data from the servers? Is there any insurance/rollback mechanism in place?

[lukevdp]

Unless you can pay taxes in Bitcoin, people will always need to be able to convert Bitcoin to fiat.

Bitcoin itself cannot be stopped, but it's utility as a currency (or, as it is now, a speculative investment) can be.