want to put your money where your mouth is?

most USD is created on a bank and is nothing more than a number on a database

now I hope I don't have to explain to you that costs near-zero energy to keepup

This is just an ugly friend type thing to make other articles look good, right?

Your not investing does not bother me. It is the unchecked trolling that reflects poorly on the community.

"Bitcoin can protect their wealth against hyper-inflation"

I myself have long been concerned about eventual hyper-inflation however, that is not occurring with USD at the moment.  Nor do I know of any indicators that suggest it will happen in the near future.  The past two to three weeks I'd describe BTC as the currency hyper inflating.  In fact at this point I consider it an over price commodity and my link above will explains it in great detail if you go to the full article.

- I already included some of your fun things like Western Union and ATMs which is being considered but hasn't happened (Speculation).
- Many in mainstream think of Kim Dot Com as a criminal.  His greed and actions did cause him a lot of problems.  While he has had success his business methods differ from mine.  I'm more curious about those who see no risk in BTC.  Using a huge risk taker like him as an endorsement makes me think you must see the risk.

So far none of the points show me that BTC is going up based on its value as a currency.  Many new services may accept it but the volume before this run up does not indicate to me that this run up is not (above $50USD/BTC) speculation.  I counter the claim that those insisting this is a bubble don't know what is going on.  In return I say those claiming this is not a bubble do not understand that massive speculation always ends with disaster.  I'm sure I don't need to rehash all of the past run ups based on speculation we saw die.  Every since the 1990s I've made money shorting speculators.  It is a very simple method that makes a lot of money.

This is silly reasoning.

By ruling the bet a push and returning the money, they can claim that this happened due to incompetence.  Coinjedi has already begun to plead incompetence.  He can understand why we may think he did a very poor job.  This is what corrupt officials always fall back on.  The referee who cheated is not going to admit to taking bribes, he'll just apologize for having such an off day.

Furthermore, it's already been pointed out that the decision they rendered doesn't point to incompetence but to simple corruption.  If you were watching a soccer game and an embarrassed looking referee disallowed 5 clear goals all against one team, would you assume it was some kind of cosmic fluke or would you reason that, given the amount of money involved on the outcome of the match, the game was fixed?

The BFL backers lost the bet.  There is no real controversy in that regard.  The BFL side failed on several different points.  Luke Jr. is working for BFL, the March 31 deadline was missed, the "product" shown is a prototype that is still being worked on and does not even have a case, the prototype was never shipped anywhere, the product Luke Jr. claims to have ordered did not even exist at the time the bet was consumated and was not among the 3 specific products mentioned...  I can go on, but there is no point.  I am not foolish enough to believe that any honest, intelligent person who is paying attention thinks that there was ambiguity.  There was none.  It was an open and shut case.  There is only one reasonable explanation for how and why this happened, and that is that betsofbitco.in had a stake in the outcome.

By your reasoning, even if we believe that an escrow or arbitrator is intentionally making bad decisions, we should not cry "theft" but should just shake our head and say "oh well, I guess I went with the wrong site".  That is not a reasonable position to take.  Think about this a little more seriously.

Who remembers Matthew's 10k BTC bet?
Well, by the "wording" of his bet one can argue that he did nothing wrong, and his scammer tag is not justified.

lesson one
dont use online wallet for long term storage. only use for daily 'pocket money amounts'

What do you think these people will do when they see the bitcoin price drop like a rock through their buying price? Look at the 2011 bubble.

Where do you see any evidence for that? I could just barely believe a doubling of real-world use, but please tell me who buys which goods or services for bitcoin? namecheap.com or wordpress.com? Reddit Gold? Have you ever heard of anybody paying a bitcoin there?

If bitcoin survives for another good number of years and does not get overtaken by something like a hypothetical bitcoin2, its prospects are, indeed, bright.

However, at the moment this rather extreme price bubble is about to severely damage its fair reputation.

Currently it is not the Cypriots or the Spaniards who buy bitcoin. It is only a growing bunch of newbie speculators and their mothers. The only reason why they buy bitcoin is because the price is rising. And the price is only rising because these people are buying bitcoin. This is how bubbles are made.

There has been no significant increase in real-world use of bitcoins. A few more companies are now accepting bitcoins, but very few customers actually pay in bitcoin. Therefore the price will sink back to pre-bubble levels within about half a year after this bubble bursts, which it may do within weeks.

As usual it is impossible to make any precise estimate about how high a bubble will go, because a single person can prick it by selling a lot of bitcoins and thus inciting a sell-off panic. If nobody does, such a bubble can grow to strange heights. But even then this one cannot grow to $1,000. As the Germans say, trees do not grow into heaven.

It is a bit difficult to say what the pre-bubble value is, because this one began before the previous one of 2011 was fully deflated. I am sure though that the bitcoin price will fall to some $20 level and quite possibly into the single digits. $50 is way out of reason. Let's talk again in half a year's time.