[189723234]

I feel that bitcoin is unstoppable.

It offers massive, tangible benefits. Money that is not controlled by corrupt institutions completely changes the game.

There is an entire industry being built around it. Thousands of engineers are creating new businesses as we speak.

It has different properties to stocks. The more people that convert their money to bitcoin, the more use it has. This is a basic property of currency. While people will say you can't buy much with it now, the very fact that massive amounts of people are now acquiring bitcoin gives incentive to people to start accepting bitcoin as a form of payment.

Most governments can now no longer make it illegal. The horse has bolted. By the time it is made illegal, millions of people will have bitcoin and you will be committing political suicide. They will try to regulate it in a way that benefits large corporations though.

I believe the transfer of money away from questionable stocks like facebook, into something based on real value like bitcoin, will crash the share market.

[zby]

The problem is that bitcoin cannot be a currency - because it cannot facilitate more than 7 transactions per second, this is many orders of magnitude not enough for a currency. It can be something similar to gold - mostly a value store. But personally I have doubts - first of all the energy costs are crazy. I think it will be eventually replaced by a POS coin - proving that the value store function of something that new is not very reliable.

https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-work-8d8265def194

[jstanley]

7 transactions per second isn't enough for it to be an everyday currency for everyone.

It's certainly enough to be an everyday currency for the people who want to use it as an everyday currency at the moment, and Lightning Network will expand the capability massively.

[cwkoss]

Bitcoin is more of a competitor to ACH/wire transfers than Apple Pay.

[soVeryTired]

> Most governments can now no longer make it illegal.

Ha. Wait and see.