Very well said, Bitcoin is indeed a lot of things. It combines literally any science out there in one or or another way or at least touches upon them or has an impact on them. Only because Bitcoin is about decentralized governance, mainstream economists should still be able to objectively get their head around Bitcoin and whether it could play an important role in global monetary order and systems.

This totally depends on the country you are living in. There have been a couple of surprises in the past when it comes to government backed securities or bonds. I know that Greece is not the best example because it was quite well known they were in dire straits, but that is one example for a government to go bankrupt. Often times people think that governments cannot go bankrupt because they could just print money. That is not the case for any government that is part of a union anyway, and for the other governments they'll go full speed into hyperinflation (Venezuela). 

The problem for some people is that it requires effort to understand Bitcoin. Going down the rabbit hole takes time and effort. What's also a problem is that some people have a kind of mental resistance against learning about new stuff, and in particular against learning about new technologies.

There are those who find that exciting and can't get enough, and there are those who throw their TV out the window when the remote control doesn't do what they want it to do. How should the latter ever understand what Bitcoin is and what it does?

But let's be honest, even though these features are awesome they also sometimes evoke distrust among people. If you get hacked, there is no way for recourse or getting your coins back. A bank would just give you your money back if they get hacked or you get hacked without being the one to evidently blame. You also have irreversible transactions, if you make a mistake your money is gone. It is as simple as that. Being the manager of your money is cool, but some people just don't like the hassle of carrying all the responsibility that comes with custodianship.

Hey dezoel, thanks for lining out these examples. Two question if I may:

1. When you pay express VPN with BTC, do they request your personal information? They are required to aren't they? Or do they provide a key two a specified email address or anything?

2. When you make all these payments with BTC, are you running into any tax related issues?

I would say the OP is right and the majority of economists calls Bitcoin out as being a big fat bubble but nothing else. Maybe they lack understanding, maybe they are even right. First and foremost I think that a lack of knowledge in technology combined with monetary theory may lead them to their negative conclusions about Bitcoin. Most of them often argue that it is inconvenient and expensive to use, but that is only the first half of the sentence because Bitcoin can improve. If you just look at that statement, they are correct. For now Bitcoin isn't what it probably is supposed to be, but that doesn't mean it is the end of the story as those economists often put it.

You can never really rule out the possibility that some type of manipulation, even the one you described, could theoretically be happening. However, the way you described it would mean you are talking about OTC trades. Those don't affect market volume or market volatility. As far as I know that data is nowhere to be reported. What does happen though might be coordinated short squeezes, meaning that if a lot of short positions are open, some whales might coordinate an attack on those short positions by buying up Bitcoin massively such that those short positions get squeezed out. The more expensive Bitcoin becomes, the harder it is to move the market in any direction, meaning that coordination could indeed become valuable even for whales.

Hm, are you sure Bitcoin's price is not related to decentralization? You may respond now that any currency being decentralized would then be as valuable as Bitcoin, but that argument doesn't hold true as Bitcoin is a forkable (don't know if the word exists, but you know what I mean) protocol, but not a forkable ecosystem. The fact that not a single entity can change the database at will gives Bitcoin value. The fact that only with the consent of the majority the database can be changed gives Bitcoin value. If it were to be decided that by August 1st there'd be one single entity in charge of keeping the database intact for the rest of the world would send Bitcoin's price on its way to zero. Or what do you think?

Good point because as we have seen at the start of Coronavirus Bitcoin wasn't performing very well. The problem with crises and Bitcoin price is that nobody has money to invest into Bitcoin. Rather, Bitcoin holders need to liquidate their positions in order to be able to pay their bills, mortgages and for everyday needs. That's a common misconception so far I believe. A lot of people think that during a really bad crisis Bitcoin goes up. That could be the case if you were able to look at a currency crisis in an isolated way. The issue with this point of view though is that a currency crisis isn't an isolated event. It comes with all the surrounding that ultimately force people to liquidate whatever assets they have. The only guys who'd benefit from a currency crisis are the rich. They have the money to gobble up cheaply liquidated Bitcoin and they have the time to endure the crisis until everything goes up again until it is time to sell into the Bitcoin buying masses at higher prices than they bought for.

This is a great topic you opened here and apart from all the issues raised like volatility, or the tendency to keep onto it because of the potential for price appreciation, and so on. The most important issue to me is what Andreas Antonopoulos once raised: taxes! He travelled around the world and paid with Bitcoin whenever he could and in order to annoy the IRS, he decided to print excel files onto paper for the innumerable amount of micro transactions he did, just to make them work so much that the amount of taxes was by far not enough to cover the work that has been put into. I think that is a big problem in many countries. They don't allow for tax free micro transactions, like paying the coffee and stuff.

I sometimes have the feelings that many people tend to make their final judgment over Bitcoin way too early. It is like going into a store, pointing at a tyre and saying "hey, wasn't this supposed to be a car?". And even that analogy lacks a bit of substance because a car is a final product, or maybe not because even that is going to evolve over time into whatever, I don't know...
We don't know how much of what is happening Satoshi was able to anticipate, or let's say partially anticipate. Bitcoin is an evolving system of which the underlying technology is constantly being worked on. I don't see why there shouldn't be the possibility that with a couple more years of development Bitcoin becomes indeed an electronic cash system. Who would have imagined even in 2013 / 2014 what this space could turn into by 2020. In my humble opinion, I guess almost nobody. Yes, we all had this vague idea that there is so much more to come, but what that could mean in concrete terms, there weren't so many to know that in advance.

All these threads here discussing "what is Bitcoin in 10 years from now" are kind of funny. I have this idea of a decentralized world, but I might be way behind with my idea and who knows, maybe we are already communicating over blockchain with a flying spaceship of Jeff Bezos, sending encrypted message with lightning speed to space.So much speculation, but one thing is for sure: we won't develop backwards technologically, unless we are facing a war in the meantime.

It can't hurt to put some effort into understanding what Bitcoin really is. It is quite different from a software where it's not important to understand why software does what it does. Now for the transaction alone it isn't that important to understand the functionalities at protocol level, but to understand why Bitcoin is making its way into our society is valuable knowledge to anyone. Understanding Bitcoin is kind of equal to questioning the world we currently live in. I think it can never hurt to understand the environment you spend your life in, its shortcomings and possible solutions. 

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Yes it is a very interesting situation we are going to face here because out of a sudden Bitcoin turns into an asset that the nation states feel obliged to compete for, although driven by different intentions of course.

Give it another five or so years and we will see the real deal enfolding in terms of international political economy. Bitcoin is truly global, Bitcoin is truly political, and Bitcoin is truly neutral no matter what size the entity or what net worth the person is.

It is a rich peoples' asset and the reason is that rich people have another endurance when it comes to holding because they can afford to hold.

If you have $100 million in the bank and you buy Bitcoin for $10 million in 2013, you don't have to care whether it goes up or down while someone with a couple of thousand in a bank is going nuts with every downswing. That is why I believe that mostly rich people are the ones who really held onto it and are now filthy rich on top of having been rich before already.

The term knowledge is quite challenging here. Who could have seriously known that this thing will literally go to the moon and will be worth over $60k one day? That is just too much. Yes if you were able to afford it you could have just held onto it, but still I doubt that many people seriously expected today's price ranges from the perspective of 2011.

Yes isn't IOTA just one switch away from being shut down or something like that? While there have been valid arguments against PoW and PoS, there are also a lot of arguments for it. The irony being here that we are in a world of consensus now! You can't have it all and the projects/coins claiming they solve problems of PoW and PoS while not sacrificing any of the achievements those two algorithms bring about so far have failed. In PoS you can implement penalties for certain actions and tendencies at the core protocol level in order to prevent harmful centralization from happening. There are all kinds of ways, most which are still subject to research and experimentation. As my previous poster implied, IOTA hasn't contributed much / anything useful so far.

The issue concerning transaction throughput could certainly be solved. What can't be solved as quickly is the volatility and that is a problem for those who would like to see Bitcoin become a viable currency. If ever Bitcoin develops a certain relation to a basket of goods that would allow for Bitcoin to be categorized as a unit of account and a medium of exchange, we are most likely decades away from that.

When you invest in something it doesn't matter what its costs are today. What you ask yourself is whether you think it can go X% up or down (short) from there or not. Even if Bitcoin is worth a million, it will most likely stay a volatile asset forever. How long has gold been around and it is still anything but stable. It can fall by 30% in a year certainly, it can go up by the same amount. That's why I think calling Bitcoin the digital gold is the best way to put it.

By the way, I am wondering how important a globally uniformly planned CO2 certificate market could be crucial to Bitcoin mining. If certificates in some places of the world are much more expensive than in others, wouldn't that lead to geographical centralization? I know it is already centralized China for the most part, but the role these certificates could play could become interesting.