You'd probably be dissapointed. She wasn't nearly as rational or philosophically consistent in her personal life as the characters she wrote about.

If I remember correctly the default settings of the GPG4Win installer leave the GPA box unchecked and instead install Kleopatra, an X509 certificate manager which is useless for most people.

Tor is the best bet for the infrastructure. The next version of bitcoind will be able to run as a hidden service, which would allow people from any country where Tor works to participate. Then all that needs to happen is for Bitcoin businesses to be Tor-friendly by at least not blocking connections from exit nodes and ideally operating a hidden service version of their website.

I think you answered your own question. Iranians who want to buy bitcoins can get them from other Iranians receiving them as remittances. All that it would take is education of the requsite communities to let them know what options are available.

Speculators are not the only people using Bitcoin, nor are they the most important. As long as there's sufficient liquidity in the market for BitPay, etc. to operate businesses can use bitcoin as a payment network without being affected at all by the exchange rate. Those who are using Bitcoin for commerce don't need to worry about the market.

You've discovered a technique for reducing decision-making errors so advanced that a lot of people with postgraduate degrees don't use it yet.

Apparently getting scammed online is like paying for college, except that it's cheaper and more educational.

It is wonderful. All the idiots who gambled on this scheme get to eat their own losses intead of claiming "exigent circumstances" and "systemic risk" and forcing their losses on to me at gunpoint. I get to fully enjoy the benefit of choosing to not participate in a Ponzi scheme.

It helps Lockheed Martin sell cruise missiles, it helps generals justify their employment, it helps the Navy request funding for more ships.

It's an extremely helpful strategy, as long as you understand who its designed to help. (Protip: it's not the "citizens")

The standard disclaimer of social engineers everywhere to preemptively explain why their policies always seems to make everybody (except them and their friends) worse off.

This statement does not parse into something comprehensible unless "hoarding" is understood to mean, "retaining purchasing power earned by deferred consumption" and "unstable" is understood to mean, "impossible for the issuer to counterfeit in large quantities without attracting pitchforks and torches".

Alternately the dollar assets could be held in something simple, like TreasuryDirect account.

Insofar as any dollar asset is safe that would be the safest place to keep the funds, and would be a good choice for utilitarian political reasons.

M * V = P * Q

Q is what's ultimately important.

At least in the US, many public sector workers get pensions that are indexed to inflation so they are insulated from all that. Not to mention that their health benefits are usually far more expensive than the monthly stipend they receive.

The wealthy are certainly taking a signifigant cut but the vast majority of the stolen productivity is going to pensioners.

Those people, especially retired public sector workers, stand to lose the most if the government looses the ability to extract production from the working via the inflation tax.

It is good for everbody except for those that benefit from the current system, and those people who basically lost their life savings because they put it all into their house, based on the delusion that it was an investment instead of a durable good.

Deflation in a bitcoin economy will come from economic output growth and the  reduction in the supply of bitcoin (lost coins). This means probably at least 5% per year, or possibly more in times of strong economic growth.

In the current economy politically favored groups get to borrow at negative real interest rates. In an environment where this is not possible (due to inability to mint new bitcoins at will) and everybody had to borrow at positive real rates you'd see commercial loans going for rates that looked like consumer credit cards. Durable goods loans (homes, cars, etc) would be expensive and require significant down payments, if they were even available.

In that kind of environment nobody would be borrowing. Individuals and businesses would need to accumulate savings prior to making purchases/expansions, like they did prior to the last hundred years of debt financing.

This is why I don't expect loans to be a very large part of a mature bitcoin economy. No lender would ever lend at a negative nominal rate so loans will be very expensive in a deflationary environment.

Consumption and investment will be funded via savings (capital formation) instead of debt.

I think some people are going to go to their deathbeds expecting to see their eleventy trillion bitcoins of accrued interest to show up "any day now".

Can it be configured to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL?

If you want the price to be less volatile do your part to increase the fraction of bitcoin transactions that are used for commerce instead of speculation.