Well, the question is open-ended since he didn't specified the point of comparison between the two. For me, both are important for their respective purposes. Regular currency has been already a part of the culture of the people around the world for a long time. After the time of barter exchange, regular money was created to buy stuffs or pay for services. Regular money is also essential for people's daily lives especially in economic purposes. Regular money is handy and basic in terms of usability.

On the other hand, cryptocurrencies where created for the main purpose similar to regular money - buy stuffs and pay services. That's why it is called cryptoCURRENCY. However, cryptocurrencies can be used in a way that regular money can't be used. One of these is its use in crypto-trading. Unlike the stock market, crypto-market uses cryptocurrencies as assets for trading, buying, and selling. Regular money can't be used in trading unless you buy stocks. Another one is that cryptocurrency can actually be used as a way to save your money, or what we call SAVINGS ACCOUNT. Crypto-wallets are actually similar to bank/savings accounts where you deposit your money in a form of cryptocurrency like bitcoin. The bad thing about it, however, is that the amount of money you've deposited might decrease since cryptocurrency is a volatile asset that its value might rise up or fall down in just a blink of an eye.

The following are my basis for a GOOD altcoin:

1.) CHEAP ALTCOIN. It is nice to buy bunch of coins/tokens if you plan to keep them for a long time. This means that the cheaper the price, the more coins you'll be able to buy.

2.) MARKET CAP OF AN ALTCOIN. Market cap refers to the total value of all the coins of a certain altcoin. This is computed by multiplying the current price of a certain altcoin to the total number of coins of that altcoin circulating in the market. If an altcoin price is $1.00, and the circulating supply is 3,000,000, then the market cap will be $3,000,000. High market cap means high potential for that altcoin's price to grow.

3.) NUMBER OF CIRCULATING SUPPLY OF AN ALTCOIN. This refers to the total number of coins of an altcoin that is circulating in the market. The higher the circulating supply of a coin, the lower the chance for it to reach its highest price. This is actually a basic concept in economics - the Law of Supply and Demand. If there's a high supply of a certain product, the tendency is that the price will be low.

4.) PRICE CHART OF AN ALTCOIN. It is good to invest to coins with a price chart that has increasing or stable (at least at a reasonable value) trend. This actually requires some knowledge about technical analysis, and is not preferable for newbies.

First of all, how can you say that bitcoin is the same as it was in 2009? In fact, it has gone so far. Its first recorded price in exchanges and market is $0.06 way back in year 2010. People at that time didn't even give importance to it, and used it like it was just nothing. According to stories, a man once bought 5,000 BTC at $27.00 while other man bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 BTC. That's weird to know especially that bitcoin has been different today. In a span of 7 years, bitcoin price has grew by 9,170,000%.

Secondly, it is not fair to compare bitcoin with Yahoo in terms of its fate. Bitcoin is a success, in my opinion. I understand how Yahoo failed when it was sold at a lower price a few years after it was offered by a company with a higher price. Bitcoin, in my opinion, is of the opposite case. The losers in the case of bitcoin are those people who bought BTC in 2010 and sold it a lower price, not knowing that its price will still grow to a massive percentage. For me, bitcoin is the Google of the cryptocurrency.

I strongly agree with you. Government can't really control bitcoin and that makes miners and the operators of bitcoin businesses and exchanges look smarter than the government. Government, in my opinion, doesn't have any idea (if not less idea) about how bitcoin actually work in its network. Most people prefer to use bitcoin now than the local money when buying stuffs or paying their bills since it is a lot easier and faster especially when the people involved in transactions are from different places.

Very true. Bitcoin and crytocurrencies are safer compared to banks when it come to the network and the management of money. Few reports of banks being hacked by hackers are very alarming especially for those who have invested their money in banks, and that will put future investors to think about investing in cryptocurrency instead of investing in banks. As long as your crypto-wallet password and important keys are well stored and saved, there is no harm in having these.

There are only two reasons why I hate (not so much, but sometimes I feel hate towards it) bitcoin, the one reason is actually I love and hate at the same time. The first thing that I hate about bitcoin is its high value today. Why? As an investor, it is not a good choice to buy expensive cryptocurrencies/coins, one of which is bitcoin. With its high value and fast growth, a lot of investors will surely love to invest on it, but the value will be a problem if you are investing a small amount.

Second thing that I hate (and love) about bitcoin is its volatility. I love bitcoin's volatility because it entices people to invest on it. On the other hand, high volatility of bitcoin usually gives problem to investors especially when forking happens. Most of the time, when the value of bitcoin pump up too high, the next possible scenario is that it will also drop down immediately without even noticing it, which gives trouble to investors, especially when not watchful.

It is not true that MOST people are leaving their day jobs or permanent jobs to prioritize bitcoin. In fact, MOST members in this forum are considering bitcoin as the secondary source of income. Another thing, signature campaigns are not actually that hard to give that much time on it. As long as you are knowledgeable enough about bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and the things related to these, then this is an easy task to do along with your full-time/permanent job.

First and foremost, bitcoin is created to serve as a DIGITAL CURRENCY. And when we say CURRENCY, it shall be used to buy, sell, and pay products or services. Second, how could you consider bitcoin as an ASSET when in fact, its value now is way far higher than its price before. You can't and you should not miss the opportunity to use your bitcoins today in buying things especially that having a bitcoin today means that you have a lot of money too. And lastly, it is not actually safe to keep BITCOIN for now. The sudden BOOM in the price of bitcoin is probably caused by the incoming hard forking in bitcoin network. In that case, you can't always expect the price of bitcoin to grow in the course of time.

Bitcoin is not responsible of the wealth distribution in the world. In fact, wealth is already distributed UNEQUALLY even before the arrival of bitcoin. Putting that into perspective, upper class and middle class people are the ones who will have an easy access to bitcoin while the lower class will be left behind. The case is not that bitcoin will allow people to classify themselves in the wealth ranking, but instead, wealth ranking/status will determine the ownership of bitcoin, although not all people know the concept about bitcoin, and might not even dare to buy it.

Not to scare or discourage you, but I don't see BITCOIN CASH to rise up anymore. With the upcoming 2nd bitcoin forking (BITCOIN GOLD), there's a high chance that the price of bitcoin cash will find its way down the market. Actually, there are 2 upcoming forking in bitcoin, which will give the investors more choices to where they can invest their money. The worst thing is that people are always fond of new things, and will probably leave bitcoin cash and switch to bitcoin gold and the other bitcoin-forked cryptocurrency.

For me, the most important thing to consider before investing to altcoins is to diversify or divide your capital into parts nad invest each part to different altcoins. Altcoins are indeed the best choice for investment especially at this time that bitcoin price is at its peak. My choices for long-term altcoin investment are LITECOINS, RIPPLES, WAVES, and STEEM. The prices of these altcoins are comparatively low (which is a good point when you want to buy a bunch of them). Ripples price is at $0.2, Litecoin at $56.70, Waves at $3.5, and STEEM at $0.97.

These altcoins also belong to top 30 altcoins with highest market cap. Ripples has a market cap of $8,265,284,820 (3rd), Litecoin has $3,032,089,394 (5th), Waves has $353,870,000 (20th), and STEEM has $236,478,875 (25th). High market cap means high chance for its price to grow.

NOTE: (The following prices are rounded and recorded as of October 22, 2017)

Yeah, that's what I think is the case most of the time. As we have observed from the first bitcoin fork (a.k.a. bitcoin cash), bitcoin price have increased a lot a week or two before August 1. Days after the forking, it immediately dropped to it's lowest of that month at $2,980. My suspicion (and I'm 95% sure of it) why it happened is that investors from other altcoins have withdrew their investments and put it in bitcoin before the forking, and then withdrew it by the time they've received their bitcoin cash. And that's still probably the case in this coming October 25 forking.

In my opinion, ethereum and other altcoins will rise up again once the forkings (actually, there are 2 coming bitcoin forking) are done. But the altcoin which I think will get a high boost in value after the forking is LITECOIN. There was a point where its value reached the $80 mark, then dropped to $40 (almost 50% decrease). Now, it is sitting at $64, and I hope that it will recover after the forking of bitcoin.

That depends if the owner/user wants to earn more or earn small. If you are really dedicated to do earn more money, then trading altcoins is better. Holding bitcoin is not always profitable compared to trading altcoins since the value of bitcoin doesn't always rise up. You also don't have the control over your earnings from holding bitcoin in your wallet unlike in trading wheree you can do a lot of thing on your altcoins. Holding is good if a crypto is on its way up, but for most cases, trading altcoin is still more profitable and safer.

Sweden is a developed country, and there's no surprise they're going to go cashless and use e-money in the near future. There's also no surprise if other big and developed countries will follow that. But I don't think ALL countries or MOST countries will follow that trend, considering that only few countries are developed and most are still in the developing stage.

In general, extinction of cash doesn't seem to happen right now and in the coming centuries. Not all people can afford to have the high-tech gadgets or cards which can be used to make transactions without cash. Just imagine children who want to buy candy in the store using a mobile phone or card.

For now, altcoins are better for long term investment than bitcoin, considering the high price of bitcoin today. My choices for long-term altcoin investment are RIPPLES, WAVES, and STEEM. These three, in my opinion, will be more successful in the coming years. These altcoins have low price (which is a good point when you want to buy). These altcoins also belong to top 30 altcoins with highest market cap - Ripples has a market cap of $8,265,284,820 (3rd), Waves has $400,443,000 (20th), and STEEM has $256,951,488 (25th).

Yeah, there are billionaires who invested some money in bitcoin. Some of these popular billionaires are Tim Draper (Founder of DFJ Venture), Barry Silbert (Founder/CEO of Digital Currency Group), Satoshi Nakamoto (Creator of Bitcoin), and Charlie Shrem (Co-founder of BitInstant). And I believe that their shares in bitcoins are what makes the bitcoin become more popular and more valuable. Anything which is supported or backed by any famous personalities (especially billionaires) will surely become a trend, and people will really love to patronize that. That might be the case about bitcoin, and I am glad that this happened.

I agree with you. Coin mining in android or ios is very impossible, especially with the amount of memory space needed to do so. You need at least terabytes of memory to do the mining. I haven't seen yet any mobile device with such amount of space/memory. The phone's battery won't also be able to carry the workload to do mining, and it will really make it to bloat and explode.

Finance and civil services, I think. Finance is no doubt the most applicable field for the crypto-world. But the negative effect on this one is that the more crypto-companies getting into finance services, the more competition among them will be present.

On the other hand, civil services will be, I think, a more popular field to apply crypto. This is what most ICOs today are aiming to reach. They are mostly about the concern of citizens, and I think that it is a great idea for these ICOs to apply cryptocurrency base on the basic or typical needs of the people.

It's funny when people here in the forum spell HOLD as HODL. And it just amaze me how bitcoin culture change the people and the way they talk. These crypto-jargon is funny, and at the same time, a bit of confusing especially for noobs. Anyways, that's the case for most of the time. In crypto-trading, you don't have to be a day-trader, and you won't actually earn if you are a day-trader. And with the volatility of cryptocurrencies, there's no problem on holding it for longer time. BUY...HOLD...when the price drops, BUY again then HOLD. When the price significantly increases, then that's the time to replace that ellipsis in the end with SELL.

No. Just because you're checking your wallet regularly to see the price, it doesn't mean that you're addicted to bitcoin. That only shows that you're aware about the things that are happening to crpytocurrencies, especially bitcoin, including their prices. That is a good characteristic of a good investor. You don't have just put your money in bitcoin and do nothing. It is like sowing a seed and let it grow. You need to visit it everyday to check whether it is in good condition or not.

Also, it is risky to leave your wallet unopened for a week or two without checking it regularly. Be responsible with your money. Unlike the local paper bills inside your wallet, cryptocurrency wallets should be check regularly so that you can manage your money base on the price changes.

There's no reason for bitcoin to end. It is very useful especially in today's generation. With the high technologies that we have today, it is very impossible that one of the best inventions of the 21st century will end in just a blink of an eye. As you've said, bitcoin's value is continuously rising up, and that will be one of the reasons why people will still invest in bitcoin and make it live for many years.

When it comes to investing to bitcoins, I think it's a little too late now to do that. Bitcoin's price is too high now. If ever you invest on it today, the profit might not be that big since you will be needing a huge amount of money to buy one bitcoin. The ideal thing to do is to find online jobs that gives bitcoin as salary or payment for your service. Investing in bitcoin is not the thing for now.

Everyone's affected by the movement of bitcoin's price. As a bitcoin user and investor, I have to make sure that I have a backup plan whatever happens to my bitcoins. There's actually no difference between YOU who use bitcoin to buy gift cards and US who use bitcoin to  convert to local currency and withdraw. Also, there's a bigger problem on the part of investors since they're the ones who are working on cryptocurrency and their investments are greatly affected by the changes in the prices of these coins.