You're making unwarranted assumptions about how many Bitcoins I own.

Anyway, it's a matter of time preference and planning.

If I would have chosen exactly 1 year ago to go all-in Bitcoin, it would have made no difference.

Suppose for the same of argument that it's 2013, my income is not pegged to bitcoin, I get paid in btc, and that I can save 50% of my earnings.

Jump forward today and using bitcoin as my unit of account, what's happened since then equivalent to a 3x pay raise, because the number of bitcoins I'd be adding to my savings now would be triple what I was adding a year ago.

Edit: Bitcoin is the best unit of account.

I don't trade.

I emigrated.

Same strategy works on slot machines.

It's fine for people who understand they are gambling, but there's a tendency for people to start believing they that it's a game of skill instead of a game of chance.

It's not a matter of how many Bitcoins I do or do not have - it's a known fact that day trading (in general, not specific to BItcoin) is a negative sum game.

Anybody who is not cheating is just achieving random returns.

Over long time scales, the lifetime returns of all investors converge to the same average value (except for the ones that manage to cheat).

"All the buyers" will never be gone.

I keep buying Bitcoins, once per month, in the form of receiving a (fiat denominated) paycheck in btc.

Every month I add to my savings a considerable fraction of what I get paid.

The evil manipulators can do exactly two things to me: they can cause me too add more Bitcoins to my savings each month, or they can increase the purchasing power of my savings.

Since I don't expect to need those savings for many years, I'd highly prefer the former over the latter, but I win either way.

Working for a living is so much easier than daytarding.

Killing Bitcoin that way didn't work in 2011. Why would it work now?

What I2P has going for it is a better theoretical basis, and a focus on hidden services rather than proxying to the clearnet.

The only thing Tor has going for it is more users - if I2P has the same number of nodes I'd expect their hidden services to be more secure than Tor's hidden services.

Last year there were 4 operating markets and one got busted.

This year there were 18 operating markets and 3 got shut down.

Odds of getting busted fell from 25% to 17%.

It's generally less profitable for LE to go after the buyers as opposed to the sellers, so the buyers worry less than the sellers.

http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_3.pdf

Natural monopoly theory is thoroughly debunked.

You misspelled "zero."

The world has been trying to converge to a single global currency for many decades. It takes concerted effort by national governments to resist this pressure.

A free market would converge to a single currency.

If you're using the word "monopoly" you're thinking of this in the wrong terms.

Currencies are communication standards, like alphabets, or numerical systems, or the metric system, or charging plugs for mobile phones.

Competing standards introduce friction, which the market continually works to erase.

This is a widely observed phenomenon.

How nice for you.

Hint: Maybe try something some epistemology?

Unfortunately for your desires, reality does not cooperate with that position.

Money is an all-or-nothing proposition because of opportunity cost.

Every Bitcoin one holds is held at the exclusion of every other possible use for that money, especially other currencies.

The act of holding Freicoin instead of Bitcoin has a calculable cost associated with that action.

If the benefits of holding Freicoin do not exceed that cost, then nobody will hold Freicoin.

When we're talking about the opportunity costs associated with currencies, then it's even worse for small currencies.

The opportunity costs associated with not holding the largest currency increase greater-than-linearly based on the relative difference in adoption between the two currencies.

I see what you did there.

Their customers will attempt to build moats by creating improvements in sidechains, and those moats would be threatened by having that capability in Bitcoin.

If their revenue comes from having customers, they have an incentive to take actions that benefit their customers, such as using their influence to delay or block progress in Bitcoin.

Nobody has answered yet what the revenue model for Blockstream is.

Until they explain themselves, it's reasonable to assume they intent to derive some financial benefit from the existence and usage of sidechains.

In that case, clearly any innovations in the main chain that reduce the need for sidechains are a threat to the revenue of Blockstream.

Unless they offer an alternate explanation of how (or if?) they intend to repay their investors, this looks like a severe conflict of interests.

This is absolutely true.

The ruling classes and their minions who control the issuance of money reap enormous benefits from an elastic money supply.

A fixed money supply truly is a dark age as far as they are concerned. Millions of people who will suddenly be forced to get real jobs, to earn only what their skills will generate via voluntary market exchanges instead of what they can enjoy by earn via the politics of pull.

For that class of people, Bitcoin is an unmitigated catastrophe.

Side chains create a place to experiment with new functionality, and also create people who have an financial incentive to make sure that functionality never makes it into the main chain.

Do you where else it's possible to test new features?

Testnet.

Where is it possible to test features too invasive for even testnet?

The btcd team has produced a great feature called simnet where you can easily bootstrap a small mining network that tests modifications of the Bitcoin protocol.

All the tools needed to develop and test safe upgrades to the protocol already exist.

If the Bitcoin Core team doesn't have enough software engineering and project management resources to push the protocol forward now, employing half of them at Blockstream and adding new opcodes to Bitcoin isn't going to magically fix anything.

The first time I heard about this idea (before it was called sidechains) was a conference where I met Adam Back. Pretty sure it was the first Inside Bitcoins conference in Las Vegas, if not then it would have been the 2013 San Jose conference.

The largest risk of that strategy is underestimating the intelligence of whomever the Trojan horse is supposed to fool.

I swear I saw a post once where one of the wallet developers (Hivewallet???) announced it was his personal and professional goal to break the limited issuance of Bitcoin as a currency.

If you can't figure out the difference ledger integrity and production quotas then you're probably not going to be able to offer much of value to this discussion.