Or they may just encourage the development of applications that cause people to avoid bothering with the "exchanging it for fiat" step at all.

All you need to spend the money in any wallet is the private key.  You can create one insecurely, such as by using a bad "brain wallet" (some would say any brain wallet), or you can trust a web wallet to keep your key online.  Or you can get hacked.  Or you can voluntarily give it up to the authorities, such as if they're waterboarding you, or offering you a deal where you get to leave prison before you're 80.

This is crackpot gibberish you basically just pulled out of your ass.

Umm, yeah.  Right.  Bitcoin isn't currency because, according to you, it "has the same problem as the dollar," since apparently the dollar isn't currency either according to your utterly idiotic made-up bullshit.

One nuisance is it's fairly easy to have this happen accidentally because of lag, but people who just wait a few seconds literally often spam the same message over and over, sometimes all day long, just to be jackasses.  And that apparently is okay.

For this to be successful, wouldn't you need an extraordinary combination of short-sighted malice from the Bad Guys combined with utter obliviousness from everyone else not involved in the attack?

Don't like the sound of that.  The occasional delay is one thing and anyone has that.  Ignoring support tickets for four days?  Two of those were the weekend, but keep us updated.

All they did was reiterate an argument first made over a thousand years ago, that was refuted just as easily back then.

The fundamental fallacy is in the very opening assumption, that simply because the human mind can conceive of the idea of something greater which than there is nothing, the human mind is actually containing or even understanding what that idea means.  After all, for any idea someone shows me of God, I can say "okay, take that and make it ten times more powerful!" 

Here are some actual criticisms of it from back when it was relevant to anything.

My personal preferred response to the argument, though, is merely that it is damn silly, since its opening assumption is a very thinly-veiled example of "okay, let's start my proof of what I'm claiming to prove exists by assuming what I'm claiming to prove exists actually exists."

I had the automatic chat ban whack me a few days ago (after well over a year on the site).  I was in the chat window and typed something and it didn't show up due to lag.  Usually that means I got disconnected, so I just typed in a few lines of gibberish, which all showed up at the same time.  Whoops.

PROTIP:  Don't do that.

Old news.  How does this argument differ in any significant way from St. Anselm's ontological argument, first made in the Eleventh Century (and arguably sooner than that)?

I suppose I misused "premining" as a term, then, since basically any transaction worth anything would be definition be on the blockchain.  But early adopters did get a serious jump on it, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I thought it was relatively well established that of the first 32,000 or so blocks, many must have been Satoshi.  Here's one fairly credible (if speculative) look at the early blocks.

It's possible they're overestimating Satoshi's mining, or that there are a lot of early adopters, but a lot of the early blocks have not been spent.

Why would there be anything reprehensible about it even if he did mine the early blocks and keep them?  Seems to me he'd have to be a fool not to.

I think Satoshi has nothing to fear from the legal authorities, unless he plans on doing something like converting those premined coins into fiat without paying taxes.  Otherwise, he can basically sit on them forever.  There's nothing illegal about creating Bitcoin or using it, and retaliating against Satoshi wouldn't harm the network in any way. 

About the only thing I know about Satoshi is he (or she or my favorite theory they) likes his privacy, and has done what is necessary to protect it.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was a small cartel including, perhaps, even David Chaum himself, and I'd be quite surprised if whoever Satoshi is, his name is unknown in the crypto community.

If I were profiling Satoshi, my guess would be an early participant on the cypherpunks list, and/or an author of early published work on digital currencies.  I would not be surprised if he has done federally funded research at an academic institution, or perhaps has some other personal or political reason that having a high profile is inconsistent with either his job (or just his preference for privacy).

The pool of people capable of creating something like Bitcoin is so small I think it may have been a group of two or three people, maybe one the initial researcher with the big idea and one or more coders who actually put together the nuts and bolts.  I could easily imagine the "members" of the Satoshi team not knowing each other's identities.

Anyway, the secrecy of Satoshi's identity makes a cool story, and makes Bitcoin look mysterious and James Bond-ish.  I like that.

Assuming he's actually doing it and not just saying he is.  People like him sometimes float vaporware concepts just to see who's interested.

Why do you hate freedom?

(Just kidding.)

Seriously, it's the same asset however it's packaged.  We trust Bitcoin because we know how it works and we know how to keep other people from stealing it.  Why is it a bad thing that your grandmother can buy it now using ways of buying things that she understands?

This Winklevoss trust is a GOOD thing.  

What's funny is how desperate McAfee the corporation is to distance itself from its namesake, when even being wanted for murder, McAfee is probably more wanting to distance himself from the corporation he started.  I'd rather have McAfee the maybe-murderer in my house (especially if he brings whatever weird research chemicals he has in his stash) then I would have that malware disguised as antivirus software on my computer.

Well, despite the unreliable criteria used to determine those 'scammer tags' you can at least be fairly certain if someone has one of those tags, it's probably deserved.  I suppose they at least have some historic value.

I'm probably fairly unusual among their customers in that I don't buy Bitcoin, but do sell it, and every one of those transactions has gone smoothly.  From the recipient's perspective, there's basically no way to defraud them.  I also have a credit union account I use solely for BTC-related transactions so if anything weird happens, it won't mess up my other finances.

True, but you're more likely to get scammed BIG by someone who was previously trusted, because you simply wouldn't trust someone for a lot of money without some reputational background.  A good con artist knows to build a reputation before the big score.

Since all the methods of "destroying" Bitcoin not only wouldn't work, but would in fact amount to torching a huge pile of money, I don't see this.  What would they get out of it?  Would they do it just for the pure evil of it while twirling a black mustache and cackling insanely?