I wouldn't take an overly simplistic fact like "Bitcoin has never failed" as proof of anything conclusive. First, "failed" is overly vague. If you mean it has never gone to zero, it's true but misleading in the sense that Bitcoin has not been without hiccups or controversies, not to mention crises. And don't forget all the exchanges that HAVE failed. Mt. Gox and Cryptsy are just two of them. There are others.

The spam attack has absolutely degraded the network. Most transactions are not affected, but many hundreds of thousands of transactions have been, and the result has been to push transaction fees through the roof. The average Bitcoin transaction fee is now over $5, where it used to be just pennies or fractions of a penny. Bitcoin is not nearly the perfect system your post seems to suggest. It's an interesting alternative to traditional banking transactions, but inferior in almost every way.

If there's anyone with more technical knowledge that can lend any useful information to any of the above questions, I'd be grateful to learn something new. It seems this post very much runs the risk of being burried into oblivion on this busy board.

Bitcoin cannot exist physically. Even if you have a paper wallet, you cannot actually spend the bitcoins except by transferring the coins digitally to someone else, which can only be accomplished through the blockchain. If you were to give someone your paper wallet, they may accept that as payment, but the blockchain wil not reflect the transaction. And as someone who previously had the private key, you can't be sure the previous owner won't still spend the coins digitally. This may seem like a non-issue, but it gets at what Bitcoin is fundamentally, and that is as a solely digital currency. It's impossible for Bitcoin to exist in the physical world, because ownership is determined by the ability to move coins in the blockchain, and the blockchain only exists digitally.

There's some nuance in what I'm saying. As theory, the fact that the USD goes to zero would not mean Bitcoin would go to zero just because its denominated in dollars. This is true because there are other currencies to value an asset in. As a practical matter, I do believe that the failure of the US dollar would render Bitcoin much less valuable (not necessarily valueless). I still believe that it is the excess wealth created by a stable world economy (possible because of the stability of the USD) that gives speculative assets the bulk of their value. I think these ideas are consistent with what I've usually said on these boards. If not, I owe it to an evolution of ideas as I read more perspectives, or poorly communicated previous posts.

The same price rally we have seen in Bitcoin has been spread among many of the altcoins as well. What's to distinguish between a bubble in one and a "legitimate" price increase in another? Obviously, bubble connotes unwarranted gain prone to bursting and losing value. What makes Bitcoin's recent rise a non-bubble but other coins that have experienced the same rise a bubble? Seems a bit arbitrary to me.

During this time of increased network congestion (seems more the norm now than ever) and the backlog of unconfirmed transactions, I'm trying to figure out how the mempool retains unconfirmed transactions. It seems that unconfirmed transactions used to drop out after a time, in my experience, around a week of being unconfirmed. . Recently, I had a transaction remain unconfirmed for 6 weeks, and it just recently confirmed as the backlog of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool was mostly eliminated. (It's currently rebuilding though).

So a couple questions:

1) has something changed recently to cause the mempool to retain unconfirmed transactions longer than it used to?
2) I'm assuming the mempool is decentralized, so what exactly determines what unconfirmed transactions are in or out?

My simplistic understanding is that my wallet broadcasts my transaction which is picked up by a node (all nodes?), and the node broadcasts it until it is bundled into a block, and unconfirmed transactions are generally sorted by highest fee/byte. Please correct anywhere this is incorrect. But are the collective nodes what constitute the mempool then, or is the mempool distinct from the nodes? And along that line, can we force the mempool to forget unconfirmed transactions of a certain age?

Inflation in USD is nowhere near the volatile swings of Bitcoin. USD inflation is currently around 1.8% per year, Bitcoin trades up and down 25% in a week quite frequently. People who are buying Bitcoin to "escape inflation" can't see the forest for the trees. They're taking on immense risk to try to manage a much smaller risk.

There's generally two ways to look at the relationship between USD and btc. The first is that bitcoin has intrinsic value indpendent of USD, so if the USD falls, btc (while indpendently stable) will "appreciate" in value relative to the USD. An offshoot of this is that the failing dollar would send people piling into btc, which would push the price up. The opposite of this view is that it's excessive wealth created by the stable value of the USD that creates the wealth necessary to allow people to speculate on bitcoin, and if the world's most stable currency failed, people would flee the riskiest assets in a massive flight to safety, which would tank the bitcoin price.

Personally, I fall into this second group. The failure of the dollar would tank the world economy, bitcoin included, which is the king of speculative assets. People will flee speculative assets and pile into traditionally safe assets, which would include gold, silver, and probably the Euro and Yen as the remaining stable fiat currencies.

Don't forget cost-efficiency. The average bitcoin transaction fee is around $5 right now. I suppose if you're spending a thousand dollars at a time, this might be relatively small for the transaction size compared to alternatives. If you're spending less than $100, that's an exorbitant fee. Online banking is generally cheaper than bitcoin by a very wide margin presently. Anecdotally, I don't pay any fees on digital transactions with fiat. Bitcoin can't touch that.

Some countries are better than others at blocking internet sites, but you've correctly identified the best way to stop bitcoin, and that's to target points of exchange. Egypt seems particularly adept at blocking websites, and blocking VPN services operating in the country as well, as we've seen in the last week (non-bitcoin related blocking, but effective to blacking out access to certain news cites nonetheless). I don't know how good the Chinese are at blocking VPNs, but I imagine with such strong state controls over the internet, if they wanted to block it entirely, they would be able to do a decent enough job at it. In January, China reiterated its ban on a range of foreign VPNs, but from what I've read, there seems to be mixed information about the effectiveness of the ban. But Egypt can do it, I don't see why China can't.

This is perhaps just a first step towards the move to digital cash. I wouldn't expect a country of over a billion people to be able to go from physical currency to digital in one move. The elimination of smaller bills seems like a logical precursor though. You have to think of these things as happening in small moves, not one overnight shift.

Holy hell! The actual odds are only 6:1, why on earth would anyone give you 1000:1? I agree the statement "0% chance of winning" is a a bit hyperbolic, but if you can pull off that bet, that's the gambling crime of the century!

Some people seem to think buying a house in bitcoin will save you tax money. Regardless of how you buy your house, you're going to have to pay taxes on it when you sell. If you're buying a house with bitcoin, you're still going to use the USD equivalent for tax purposes. All real estate transactions are registered with a county or local government office, you cannot buy a house anonymously. You will also still be subject to real estate taxes while owning, not just when you sell.

Investing in ICOs is a crapshoot. Nobody has a realistic expectation of which coins are going to catch on with investors (and I use that term almost facetiously, because they're really just gamblers). New coins aren't really fulfilling a new market function, so it's more of an exercise in marketing to build buzz around a coin than introduce a new product the market actually wants or needs.

Bitcoin may be trading above $2000 regularly, that doesn't make it stable. Bitcoin continues to be remarkably volatile.  This is a price chart over the last 14 days. This is not a picture of stability.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. The one-time use bonus is an important detail. Until you said that, I thought it worked on a time window like the reward point bonuses. That changes the math a little for me when determining if I should try to earn it.

This is a good point, but I don't have faith that a crisis will prompt the necessary changes to the ecosystem. The block-size problem has already been simmering for a couple years, and some key developers (like Mike Hearn) have left bitcoin over the foundation's inability or unwillingness to address the problem. I would hope the scenario you laid out would come to fruition, just like I would like to think that the people in charge are logical, long-term thinkers. However recent (in)actions and the current trajectory leads me to believe that influential insiders are plagued by the same conflict of interests that bog down every bureaucracy when there is significant wealth at stake: an unwillingness to do anything that will drastically change the current environment and threaten their vast bitcoin-related wealth.

About the program boost the free-to-play reward by playing the multiply game or buying lottery tickets: does that reward stack with other rewards? For example, if I successfully boost the f2p reward throughbuse of the multiply game, then purchase a boost with reward points of 100%, will both boosts work together?

There's no reason to say that without the USD Bitcoin wouldn't have any value. Things have value regardless of how many currencies there are in what world. If the USD didn't exist, there would be another medium of exchange used in the United States, and the price of Bitcoin could be known in that medium. It may be true that Bitcoin would have reduced value, but that's another question entirely since it's the excess wealth allowed by our current stable financial system that creates the excess to drive up the value of speculative assets like Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a remarkably low utility outside of gambling like that.

All you do is spout opinions without substantiation. Explain how the USD is a speculative asset, and be sure to include an argument that acknowledges the fact that it's generally a more stable currency than any other fiat currency. The definition of financial speculation is "the act of trading in an asset or conducting a financial transaction that has a significant risk of losing most or all of the initial outlay with the expectation of a substantial gain." If your economy is based in USD, the USD cannot be a speculative asset because that's the default currency, not an active investment decision to chase returns that you've traded in to. Thus, as is plainly evident, "any fiat currency is not a speculative asset by definition."