Every money is based on faith and belief, and bitcoin is no different. Gold, dollars, stocks: they only have value because we *believe* they do. This is the true secret to money and also why bitcoin will succeed more wildly than anyone understands.

What is the US Dollar really worth?
What is a Picasso painting really worth?
What is my education really worth?

Someone remember the pizza billboard?

That pizza is now worth 21.5 million LOL

Shit's ridiculous and I love it.

If US banks were to adopt a blockchain technology, it will be to reduce their own overhead and expenses, and I would guess they would keep it between bank-to-bank transfers.
I have a very dismal view of banks and how unlikely they are to make our lives any easier. I don't expect these archaic systems to be replaced anytime soon because 1) why spend the money? 2) there is now an industry of instant transfers that mask ACH in the background. Banks now have a similar service called Zelle. Want your money now instead of tomorrow? Sure, just pay our fee…
I'm in the crypto market as a way to make money outside the banking system. And for the foreseeable future, yes, I realize I will have to ultimately use ACH to get money back to my credit union…but it's the world I live in.

The name of the company is listed on this website somewhere as a scam.
The email matches one of the definitions or formats on this website.
The organization has no website and can not be located in Google.
The email or requestor asks for bank account information, credit card numbers, driver's license numbers, passport numbers, your mother's maiden name or other personal information.
The email or caller advises that you have won a prize - but you did not enter any competition run by the prize promoters.
The email claims you won a lottery (we know of NO legal lottery that notifies winners by email)
The mail may be personally addressed to you but it has been posted using bulk mail - thousands of others around the world may have received the exact same notification. Especially true if you find an exact or similar email posted on this website.
The return address is a yahoo, hotmail, excite.com or other free email accounts. Legitimate companies can afford the roughly $100 per year that it costs to acquire and maintain a domain and related company email account.
The literature contains a lot of hype and exaggerations, but few specific details about costs, your obligations, how it works, etc.
The prize promoters ask for a fee (for administration, "processing", taxes, etc.) to be paid in advance. A legitimate lottery simply deducts that from the winnings!
The scheme offers bait prizes that, if they are real, are often substandard, over-priced, or falsely represented.  Or, as part of the prize you can purchase "exclusive items" which may also be over-priced or substandard.
To get your prize might require travel overseas at your own cost (and personal risk) to receive it.

Unclear at best.
A large portion of traders and one of the major exchanges here recommends declaring profits as "misc. income" which means for MOST income tax brackets they will be taxed at a higher rate than the current capital gains tax in Japan.
Capital Gains tax would be better for most people, especially if you made a huge profit.
However, there is no clarity.
People who don't sell won't have any problems though.

How very Rousseau. A nice thought, but I'm not convinced people are inherently good, nor that a truly privately run society is either possible or sensible.

The real gain, maybe
, will be with the enabling of Lightning and other smart contracts etc. With lightning, essentially you create a contract, enforced by the blockchain, where you and a party can keep a balance of coins between you that can flow back and forth, until limit is reached or some party wants to settle it. Once the contract is recorded on the blockchain, it can be changed when both parties sign it, but settled when one of them demands it.
This is the simple explanation according to my current understanding of LN

Some of the limitations that cryptocurrencies presently face – such as the fact that one’s digital fortune can be erased by a computer crash, or that a virtual vault may be ransacked by a hacker – may be overcome in time through technological advances. What will be harder to surmount is the basic paradox that bedevils cryptocurrencies – the more popular they become, the more regulation and government scrutiny they are likely to attract, which erodes the fundamental premise for their existence.

Is the government seriously considering to treat Bitcoin like other currencies? If yes, that would be highly interesting in a age of negative interest rates.

Bitcoin’s Appreciation Beats Dollar’s Inflation. Prices in the government’s CPI index base this on 25 items that they change conveniently to fit the numbers the want to show. If meat prices are rising 10% a year, it is simply removed and replaced with something that doesn’t reflect the actual higher rate of inflation. A good way to game the system, and keep you ignorant.

Something which suggests the currency has become centralized in many ways. Far more than some other coins, like ethereum, where soft-fork upgrades are not possible due to attack vectors, leaving hard-forks as the only option.

They are just scared, Their masters (the banks) don't want people to trade with each other without them being the middle man. They don't like the digital currency, but they would like a cashless society which they control and regulate. Bunch of hypocrites!

Fiat was never "out of nothing", to be honest I think it's perfectly reasonable to create money off the back of a good business plan based around something considered of value, that money created than being destroyed as the bank-loan or whatever is paid off. What we're really talking about with fiat is money based on obligation (debt / credit). Problem is the system is easily captured. All money is in any case a social artifact. I like bitcoin because it's based on a consensus of value where the number of units hold-still so that value can be reached by said consensus.

Bitcoin is digital cash. Someone could avoid taxes in the same way they avoid taxes with physical cash.

The authorities dont have much trouble policing income tax with physical cash so I'm not sure bitcoin would be any different.

I think the problem is that there's so much scamming with Bitcoin. It's really ridiculous how rampant the scamming is. If you try to sell Bitcoin for PayPal there's like a fifty percent chance you're going to get scammed so they want no part if it. It sours people's idea of PayPal. Like, I never had any problem with PayPal until I sold some for PayPal and found out what charge backs and disputes were. I'm not saying Bitcoin is bad, I like it and it has its uses, but it's not really compatible with PayPal.

A 51% attack doesn't give you full power over the bitcoin network. The farther back in the blockchain transactions are, the more secured they are against this kind of attack. Realistically, an attacker would only be able to modify transactions within the past few blocks. They would also not be able to make new coins out of thin air - except those received as block mining rewards as usual.

Many people might not realise that all currencies work exactly the same - if you are holding a coin or note of your own local currency in your hand, at any given point in time there are millions of people buying and selling your local currency, so while you might observe it as stable, it’s value actually continuously changes. When you want to exchange it for another currency at a currency desk, let’s say for USD, one day you pay 10 local currency to a dollar, the next day maybe 11 or 9. Bitcoin works exactly the same way - you can just think of it as a currency other than the one you are used to.

Bitcoin is making strides to make its currency and its use more secure to encourage growth and confidence. In order to get rid of a lot of myths about Bitcoin and its uses, these changes will change the Bitcoin’s reputation and the world’s trust in its service.

Not really. Bitcoin usage constitutes a very low percentage of the cryptocurrency’s transaction volumes.