[astrodust]

"If I lose all my Bitcoin because it turns out that Bitcoin was a total scam, at least I can switch my now worthless assets to...wait a second."

Fiat money rarely becomes utterly worthless. Even Zimbabwe currency, unbelievably inflated, is still worth a marginal amount as a collectible.

Blockchain currencies have gone from something to nothing in seconds.

[fdggdfsvscvsd]

The value of Bitcoin is not something Bitcoin makes any promises about.

The technology is obviously not a scam. At most it could turn out that it has technical flaws, like the crypto algorithms could be broken or whatever.

People selling you Bitcoin or making you promises about Bitoin might well be scammers. But that's not the same thing.

Worthless fiat money: it seems to happen a lot, actually. I have a couple of Billion Reichsmarks I could show you. I don't think Zimbabwe $ are worth enough to support your argument.

Of course to use Bitcoin, you have to trust that it will have or keep some value. In that sense, yes, you are back to trust.

[astrodust]

When the Bitcoin network goes offline then every BTC in existence will be worth exactly $0.0000.

When Zimbabwe blew up their money the bills themselves still had marginal utility as wallpaper or as collectibles. Collectively these bills are probably worth millions because there were so many of them.

If you have any Reichmarks around they're actually worth a fair bit considering they're not legal tender. Bills on eBay go for $5 or more depending on their condition, coins for far more. This is almost a hundred years after the implosion of the currency.

Zimbabwe and the Reichmark are extremely rare events. There are hundreds of countries in the world and every decade one or two might suffer from out of control inflation.

Bitcoin may well be a scam. We can't prove it isn't because the creator(s) remain unknown and their intent is based entirely on speculation.

I assure you that Bitcoin physical memorabilia will be worth infinitely more than Bitcoin itself within twenty years. A single shirt or mouse pad will be worth more than the entire market cap of Bitcoin.

[fdggdfsvscvsd]

I doubt Zimbabwe Dollar paper is worth millions, but OK...

I'll check the value of the Reichsmark, but again, I suspect the market is limited.

Network going down: in theory you could keep it up with a Raspberry Pie, so I suppose somebody will. Although I don't know if all the mining hardware out there would make it nonviable (as anybody could start a mining attack with such mining hardware, against a Pie).

As for proving Bitcoin isn't a scam: we don't need the inventor or their plans, we have the implementations of it. That can be validated, as much as possible. I'd argue that if it still has flaws, then they weren't because of scamming, but because of technical issues nobody could foresee.

Edit: they seem to be selling notes of one billion Reichsmark for 1€ on ebay (here in Germany). Not really worth the effort.

[astrodust]

1€ is an infinitely larger amount for an old "worthless" bit of paper than anyone will pay for any amount of Bitcoin when the network collapses.

I don't mean it "goes offline", I mean that the blockchain is compromised by a 51% attack or something worse and the whole thing can't be trusted, so nobody cares about it at all.