It is neither as it had not yet been acepted in most places officially and does not have an origin. It's more like a stock. Sure you can pay with stocks in very few places, but it is not a currency nor money. Sure, bitcoin is more widely accepted, but still not as much.

The main reason is the rule of economy: the demand = the supply. If the supply is lower then the demand, then this inequality is balanced by rising the price of the supply, therefore making it available to less people and lowering the demand.

It may be helpful to the world's economy, but not to an economy of an individual country, as the whole system is decentralized and the investments are not held by anybody.

In my opinion, banks have a slightly different function than Bitcoin, but since banks are directly connected to currency and Bitcoin is a substitute to that. I mean, even the dumbest person, looking at the speed of development of crypto (in term of market cap.), would get worried about future of currencies.

At least Russian government is already implementing it. It is equivalent to the official currency and i personally don't see the sense, since the government has nothing to offer and it will just be equivalent to 1 ruble always.

I somewhat condivide your opinion, but at the same time it's not quite right. Research some ICOs, they collect tons of money, helping them to get real. That is in most cases good. But, of course, fraud is possible.

Yeah, it is also very easy to make % on fresh coins/ICOs. Like Tron for example: starting at 0.0015$ and growing up to 0.27$ on hype, which is an increase of 17900%.

For now, this statement might be mostly delusional, as the price only grows if there is a reason and so far there isn't any.

I'd say that if you like living on the edge, you can invest in fresh coins and ICOs, just do some research. And if you are up for a safer route, invest in BTC, but I would not advise as there is a huge chance to lose it all and there is a comparably smaller chance for a big profit.

You can explain it by the fact that the whole market capital is based on BTC, even though it's dominance is only around ~35%. To understand easier imagine yourself as a nerdy, nervous and completely unexperienced crypto investor. If the BTC goes down, most nervous people cash out immediately and cause the rate to drop, which triggers some more nervous people to cash out and so on. It happens all over the market and there is really nothing deep behind it.

According to my experience, the rise and the fall may not be as predictable and will have large time thresholds and to raise your capital safely by a percentage around 30% may take you 7 months or more, and that is considering that you are still under risk.

I personally believe that no. Almost every month there are some exchange frauds, mining frauds and such. Also nobody is protected from a virus to hack into your wallet and steal your BTC, which happens very often these days. But when it comes to hacking the blockchain itself, seemingly nobody had yet succeeded, and that is the reason why blockchain is still functional.

As by now, the blockchain seems an invisible system and is much safer than any security system created until now because no matter how complex it is, there is always a workaround. I guess it would be a great step forward in banking or in any industry involving digital security. Blockchain has a very big potential when it comes to the security of digital data and I guess it is not the only application it could be used for.

It is similar in a way but quite different at the same time. Stocks directly represent the capitalization and the success of the company. Instead, Bitcoin can get affected by the positive news, but not as much as stocks, it is a speculation at most. But stocks are a pure investment, instead bitcoin is a currency, has it's own market and is a stock itself, just with a much more depth to it. You can use Bitcoins to buy services, instead with stocks you can't.

In my opinion, the hype is one of the major factors for the price drop. I can introduce a quick story of TRON, for example. We probably all remember how TRON was massively pumped and promoted by the media informators. The CEO of the company was constantly posting posts like "TRON to the moon", "We are the best", "we are the next Bitcoin". All of these factors contributed to the hype and the coin grew up to 0.25$. And at that time a scandalous event happened: the CEO of TRON sold all of his tokens, which was like 7 billion, don't really remember. And the negative hype got the coin all the way to 0.03$. Many people lost their money due to that hype of selling TRON, which could be easily avoided by just not spreading the negative news.

I'm not really a professional in this field, but I would suggest investing up to 50% of your bank in Etherium, 25% in NEO, and optionally 25% in small cryptos in the stage of ICO, as most of them grow after the launch at least for a month. Some skyrocket, like Dropil, some grow just a bit or even just stay at the same price. But out of 24 ICOs I invested in, only 1 dropped in price by 18%, the other ones only grew. Just be sure to sell it in some month, don't keep it for the long term if you don't wanna risk.

Let's say it is an investment. Nobody accepts a Ferrari as a payment in the supermarket, but you can sell it, get money and use it to pay for your cookies. See where I'm heading? People who own factories, hotels and such, can't use it to pay in a supermarket. Not everything that has value can be used to pay for common needs.

Of course, they can not kill it as it is a decentralized network, but they can just minimize the money flow by banning the exchanges or any other way of exchanging tokens, not only bitcoin, 'killing' it. If you think any currency is just a unit, supported by something. In USA dollar is weakly supported by the reserve, in Russia, the currency is obligated to be supported by its full value in gold. Instead, Bitcoin is not supported by almost anything, except the investors and the investments. So if it will get banned on a world scale, chances are it is going to fall. 

I personally think that if a big currency like dollar or euro falls, that will boost the value of bitcoin incredible. This happens due to the fact that people need currency to use. If the dollar fails, of course, nobody will use national currency like euro in the USA, instead, Bitcoin is a quite famous, more advanced and international alternative. It is decentralized, so anybody can use it, and also quick transactions across the world will definitely make it used in an appropriate scenario. You could pay everywhere with it, just having something like a credit card or such.

First of all, this discussion had been asked hundreds of times and is asked over and over again. Please check pinned messages or search before posting. Then, this thread needs to go to Beginners and Help board, were discussing Bitcoin here, boys

Onto your question: merit is awarded to people for making quality posts. How? People manually give merit to posts they like. Who? Different people, mostly high rank, give out merit. I'm not sure but I think for every merit you receive you also get 0.5 sendable merit. I need to double-check that, not really sure. You welcome.