If I told you what those "specs of dust" will be worth one day, you wouldn't ask such a question.

No protection? This is good enough for me:

I would do nothing, maybe have a friendly conversation. This person cannot affect me financially or otherwise.

The idea that you can destroy - or even harm - bitcoin by buying OR selling BTC is as absurd as the idea that you can harm the internet by downloading or uploading information.

3 cities away...

with bitcoin you can do the same 3 continents away.

Try that with your debit card and most banks will freeze your account without your consent, and their fraud department will call you up asking WTF is going on.

See the difference?

No, you misunderstand me. Fiat money can only exist (be used) at one place at one time - even digital fiat.

With bitcoin, you can share one address key with multiple people anywhere in the world, and share that money simultaneously without worrying about bank delays, fees, changing currencies, or any of that obsolete nonsense.

No offense Elwar, but your analogy is shit.

If fiat is the car, than bitcoin is the teleporter. Bitcoin can be in two (or 42) places in the world at the same time. That's teleportation.

Exactly. I like Andreas's analogy when he called Bitcoin a zodiac that bobs up and down with the waves. A zodiac sitting next to the Titanic that is fiat, which has just struck an iceberg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr4y9vBApz0

Friend, you need to deprogram. Unlearn your brainwashing. You should check out Changing Education Paradigms with Ken Robinson. I also recommend Bruce Levine's Rebel Yell.

As someone who was forced to take Ritalin from 2nd grade all the way through the end of high school, I find a low-sugar diet and frequent exercise + sex to be a far superior method for managing my "AD/HD" (a misnomer & piss-poor descriptor of the brain style / "disorder", btw).  

Get this, my former psychiatrist now buys weed from me on occasion. A man with easy-access to any prescription drug, told me weed is the best anxiety relieving medicine he knows of. I shit you not.

Indeed, the parallels are all too obvious for those of us who remember the headlines:

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/05/business/worldbusiness/05iht-cyber.t.html

Retirement is my bitcoin career.

Capitalism makes me sick, I don't engage with it unless I'm coerced to for my survival.

I will find something kind and compassionate to do with my ample free time.
 

And then the question will become, what exactly is so important about the number 12, or the number 365, or the number 8,670 (hours) that we should place such emphasis on it as a determination of bitcoin's usefulness or value?

Answer: Nothing! There is absolutely no good reason to use the time it takes Earth to completely orbit Sol as an investment metric. It's sheer nonsense, the shallowest of logic.

Welcome to the infancy of a new technology. These are early days.

I was ready to make that call the day I read Satoshi's whitepaper.

The internet of money? Check and mate to you, ancient centralized violence-backed scam system AKA fiat scrip.

Correction, Americans are broke. The corporations have moved their factories overseas, and with it they've taken most of the jobs supporting our once thriving middle class.

In the next phase, they will take the services industry. This has already begun, and the problem will be exacerbated by mass-automation, meaning robotics - take a look at what Google has been buying (spoiler: over a dozen robotics firms).

What America is experiencing is a process referred academically as "economic inversion". It's America shifting from a first world country to... god knows what kind of hellhole America will be when every major metropolis goes the way of Detroit...

Yep, I'm not switching to circle until I see an Android app

See this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=801628.0,

or just read this: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/why-bitcoin-value-doesnt-matter/

It'll be close enough that the differences won't matter.

I disagree, the guarantee is the technological innovation Bitcoin represents. Solving the Byzantine General's problem with a decentralized public ledger was a massive advancement in computer science. It cannot be ignored.

It's folly to pretend things are the same now as the were before this technology existed. They're not, and they never will be again.

Thank you for putting this nonsense right up front, I knew to stop reading without wasting too many of my valuable seconds.

OP is correct. Comparing Bitcoin's value against fiat is like comparing oil's value to steam before the oil age, or comparing ARPANET's value to the telegraph in 1985. A premature comparison of infant tech to dinosaur tech.

These fiat <-> crypto comparisons are going to look extremely silly in five years, downright hilarious in ten, and fully absurd in twenty.

"The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.[1] Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking."

http://gendal.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/what-is-the-irreducible-core-of-bitcoin/

“Bitcoin is the world’s first system of digital cash, which allows peer-to-peer value transfer over the internet with no reliance on third parties.  It is built on a new invention, the decentralized global asset register. This global asset register is the world’s first decentralized consensus system.”

The world’s first internet-scale decentralized platform for value exchange

First, Bitcoin is the world’s first true system of digital cash, which allows peer-to-peer value exchange over the internet with no reliance on third parties.   This is the key feature of Bitcoin as a currency and payment system and explains most of the current infrastructure build-out.

… implemented on a decentralized global asset register…

Secondly, Bitcoin works because it is based on a new concept: decentralized global asset registers.

Decentralised global asset registers are also an entirely new invention. They can be used to register and transfer ownership of any digital asset.

It is this that people are talking about when they say things like “currency is just the first application” for the Bitcoin platform.

… which is a decentralized consensus system

However, the story doesn’t stop here.  There’s a third element: how do these asset registers work?   They work because of a third breakthrough: the invention of “decentralized consensus systems”.  That is: internet-scale systems that can reach and maintain a common state without the involvement of any third party and in the presence of malignant adversaries.   This is a breathtaking breakthrough in computer science; we should expect to see the most forward-looking computer science schools undertaking active research in this space.

What is Digital Scarcity?

"...a system that allows you to make objects in the digital world “scarce”.  The obvious intuition here is to think of .mp3 files.  If I email one to you, it hasn’t been transferred, it has been duplicated and is no longer scarce.  We know what happened to the recorded music industry when this happened on an industrial scale.   Back’s concept, thus, is the problem of how to enable transfer without duplication.  Clearly, this property is key to making Bitcoin work and Back’s phrase captures it perfectly: “digital scarcity”."