[r3ctilinear]

Since the July 2014 mining pool distribution wake up call (the likely "attack" event you're referring to and blowing out of proportion) Bitcoin mining has become more decentralized and more mindful of safe hash rate distribution. The hash rate has also increased to be 4.5million times stronger(!!!) since then. Winning an arm wrestle against a ~1ZETTA hashes/second distributed protocol with an interest in self preservation is SO not "relatively straightforward" that it's funny.

Gold is utterly impractical unless it's paper gold in which case you have limited sovereignty over it. People keep cutting open gold bars and finding tungsten! lololol

The TPS works fine for me. So does store of value. So does layer 2 transactions. A new global monetary standard has arrived whether you like it or not.