| > There is no physical law that prevents the breaking of the entire bitcoin model, or that ensure the network - and one and only one unforked network - will always operate. But there is, its the law(s) of thermodynamics. Entropy is derived from thermo, information theory from entropy, and cryptography from information theory. So the theoretical security of bitcoin is absolutely rooted in physical scientific law. > I have absolutely 0 faith whatsoever that bitcoin the current protocol can last even 3 years. It's already going on 4 years, since the last critical bug you mentioned (August 2010). But you do have a point, that the software is not formally verified for correctness. (If it was, then we'd have the practical guarantee that the implementation of the protocol is as sound as the design of the protocol in theory.) However, you aren't making a fair comparison to the security of gold. You're comparing gold in an idealized scenario to the real-life in-practice security of bitcoin. But the security of gold in practice is also flawed, e.g. the case of counterfeit bars with lead in the middle and gold on the outside. Also, the physical nature of gold brings risks from which bitcoin is immune: it occupies physical space and so is impossible to hold secretly, and moving it securely requires an armed escort (even that doesn't eliminate risk, only reduces it). In an apples-to-apples comparison you have, on one hand, the potentially/likely buggy, imperfect software which implements Bitcoin. And on the other hand gold with all its real-world in-practice flaws (true supply masked by a paper market, physical inconvenience & risks, etc). > The truth is that there should be a bitcoin-like protocol that contains real-world regulatory action: if such a coin were pinned to the dollar, ($1/coin) [...] the protocol would be able to replace fiat currencies much more easily. There's substantial ongoing effort to create exactly this. But generally the proposal is for the "real-world regulatory action" to be the deterministic output states of a decentralized "contract" enforced by the laws of computer code running on a p2p network. Rather than the whims of a centralized group of emotionally charged and politically biased humans. |