Indeed ridiculous, ECB is printing 60 billion Euro per month right now, and comparing to that, those 1.6 billion debt of Greece is nothing

Although Euro can be created out of thin air, ECB is afraid of this: If Greece keeps borrowing money and never return them, other countries will follow suit, then after a while no one will be working and every one is borrowing Euro to spend, thus Euro's value will drop dramatically and their power of money printing will become as good as Zimbabwe government

In fact the trend of confidence collapse of fiat money's value is slowly growing when people's knowledge about money is growing. Kicking Greece out of EMU can delay the inevitable for a few years, so that banks have more time to purchase enough assets (maybe bitcoin) using Euro out of thin air

Unlike China, Greece have no large bitcoin exchanges, so the capital outflow of Greek people using bitcoin is relatively difficult

A large scale short squeeze on Huobi  

This is centralization, we need more farms at other places of the world 

99% of bitcoin, 1% of gold

Gold awareness is already widely achieved, it will be produced more and more with future technology, and it will be used less and less in digital society, so the supply demand outlook is not that bright, the industry usage can be ignored

Bitcoin on the other hand is on the way to mass adoption, in a rising trend in almost every aspect. It is the growth that matters

People tends to miss the huge cost associated with fiat money

The cost of making fiat money is typically a war, and the energy consumption of a war could be billions of times more than bitcoin mining, not even mention millions of lives involved

In fact, even after you conquered a country and start to print fiat money without any cost, you still can not make sure that those paper and numbers will lose their value dramatically, because they have to stand against the speculations on foreign exchange market. So central banks have to spend many more times fortune than bitcoin mining to build up their foreign currency reserve to protect the exchange rate of their local currency

Those costs were mostly hidden from the citizen for that country. Everyone working in the country are contributing to the value of its monetary system, just they don't know. But for bitcoin, if you don't care, you contribute absolute nothing, only miners do the work, so the efficiency is extremely high

This author have indeed done some research and thinking! The catch 22 part especially has some insight

However he's view is not enough deep: People will not store their bitcoin FOREVER, when their coins have appreciated enough (typically 10x to 100x), they will start to spend at least some of them (Speculators might dump all of them after a 10x increase, that's the reason for large price fall after a bubble)

And this behavior is self-supporting and long term sustainable: Saving for the long term and spend slowly in future will not change the shrinking supply nature of bitcoin. So, just like a pension plan, with a mathematically guaranteed return, that's the most attractive part of bitcoin

For safe storage, bank still seems to be a good place. But lending is unlikely to be popular with bitcoin, so a bitcoin bank most likely will provide the safe storage service against a fee

If you really have the necessary skill, that fee can be avoid, so does many IT experts. But it takes some effort to build a safe storage solution for non-IT people

SEB prohibited me from using their bank account to do bitcoin business  

Due to low traceability, the easiest way for government to regulate bitcoin today is to treat it exactly like cash. All the limitations to cash applies to bitcoin, like daily/weekly withdraw limit from exchanges and maximum amount of bitcoin that you can buy/sell from exchanges each month

That will stop large amount of speculative bubbles and large scale money laundering. However, that will not stop business using bitcoin to do large transactions without touching fiat money. So I guess for business similar rules will also apply: No bitcoin payment is allowed above certain amount. Since businesses are much easier to regulate, they will follow the rules

And this will not stop people from using it as an investment vehicle, purchase a few coins monthly and spend them after many years. For exchanges and institutions, the capital flow cap might be lifted

That's a lot of coins, some people still have hope to reach 10000 coins holding target 

Bitcoin transaction fee is related to the data traffic, not the amount of coins transacted, so it is more favorable for large transactions than small transactions

Just treat it like cash, refuse large scale transactions and set daily limit, this will avoid lots of AML work

Based on historical performance, even 1% of bitcoin exposure in portfolio will give you a potential return of 25% for the whole portfolio per year. Of course that was largely due to two waves of technology shift, without significant technology breakthrough in sight, the growth will slow down a bit

Indeed, political power of programmers are on the rise in almost every industry. However there are many basic properties are prohibited to change, like total number of coins, POW mining, difficulty adjust mechanism, block generation speed, reward halving scheme etc... So core devs are mostly doing performance oriented improvements. Even so they would raise the debate of block size limit to political level, that is too much

I guess XT is a pilot project by Gavin and Mike to test their support rate, but the way of voting is useless, someone could easily setup hundreds or thousands of nodes with either core or XT clients and affect the vote result

Vote is not a solution for bitcoin. Consensus is based on general understanding and facts, currently too many talks, no facts. I suggest this article

https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-part-4-simulating-practical-capacity

I guess majority of people that have serious investment in bitcoin ecosystem will take a "wait and see" approach, hold on to the universal wisdom in IT projects: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". From the simulation time line, we have at least 6 months before we see some major slowdown in transactions, and even if we reached that stage, a more conservative approach like 4MB blocks might be adopted: When people are facing future financial uncertainty, they tends to reduce the risk exposure

You can not kick the can down the road forever. Banks usually drive larger and larger bubble to create jobs and increase income, however they have run out of bubbles now. When people consume something from future, but their future income is getting worse year by year (Due to market saturation and technology unemployment), less and less people will be able to pay back the loan, so more and more people will default and banks will eventually acquire majority of the assets many years down the road.  Of course no one cares when they have a better life now, but how about their next generation? The system is unsustainable long term wise, the situation is getting worse for young people quickly

Much faster than you can imagine

As long as people are involved, there will be politics. But I don't think bitcoin should have anything to do with politics, any kind of political practice will just make things more complicated, the XT is obviously such a movement (Gavin using XT to test his support rate)

The consensus is easy to reach when the majority of transactions are queued for at least 1 blocks, and that will happen long before the 1MB cap were reached for every blocks

Here is a good article from tradeblock researching the capacity

https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-part-4-simulating-practical-capacity

As long as you can print money, you can always pay back whatever amount of debt, that's not the problem. Only a country like Greece who can not print money for themselves will run into huge problems

However, those printed money's initial ownership is strange: It should belong to governments, but in reality they all belongs to central banks, which in turn is owned by regional reserve banks. So banks actually pay back the debt using printed money, at the same time those money become the new debt of the government, so that government's debt is ballooning (They borrow money from central bank to pay debt)

Anyway, banks can write off those debt just like they create money, so the debt is really an illusion. It is a way to keep the game running, but the game designer can easily change the rules and still make it work

But foreign investors in US government bonds will not write off those debts, they will require a 100% repayment plus interest, so central banks will print some money to pay them in future

This games runs as long as people accept payment in fiat money, if the trust for fiat money is gone, then the system will collapse

This is the problem I see with XT move, we should avoid politics in bitcoin, it should function like gold, no human can change the basic properties. Gavin threw out this XT version without reaching enough consensus, its intention is very unclear, bitcoin should not become a tool for people to realize their political interest

Maybe there are not so many people invested that much in bitcoin?  

It takes time and also necessary skill. People will start to care about the network health only when they have been involved for enough long. I just setup my dedicated node last year, although I have been here since 2011. Mining is the first thing every one noticed because it is incentivized, running nodes are not. If mining always require a full node setup, then we might have millions of nodes    And only after you have a full node setup, you can start to run P2POOL, which is the ideal form of pooled mining, a catch 22 situation

Comparing with early days when everyone could run a full node, the number of nodes are shrinking. The hash power concentration also reduced number of miners. But the current nodes are mostly dedicated hard core nodes, they will exist as long as bitcoin exists, and hopefully the number will increase following more awareness of the network health