I heard similar on slashdot in July 2010 when it was around $0.10.   You are 9 years too late with the FUD.

The statement wasn't that it would create a scare to make the miners bail out, but a market scare. 

I don't believe anyone with any understanding of how bitcoin works believes for a second that hash rate dropped by 40%.  As has been discussed up-thread and elsewhere this is likely due to poor logic and calculations on these web sites by not using a long enough rolling window to show the current hash rate.  In ~10 days at the next difficulty adjustment, the truth will be obvious.

If you feel the need safety that you can't provide for yourself, just stick with fiat and credit cards.  Please don't import the training wheels from there into the Tour de France, it only slows those athletes down.

WE?  Speak for yourself.  The nature of freedom is that there are inalienable rights not subject to the whim of the majority. Freedom of expression is one of them.

If you value freedom, anonymity is critical. If you value control and authoritarianism (fascism, socialism, communism etc) you don't want anonymity because it will interfere with your control over everyone else.  Control is a siren song, but the odds are you won't be the one in control, you'll be the one controlled.

Exactly. If one starts measuring just after one block and ends just before the next, the apparent hash rate would be zero - no blocks were found. If I start measuring just after block A and then end just before block C with B in between the hash rate would be much less than if I start measuring just before block A and just after block C.  If this persisted over 24-72 hours, it might be meaningful, otherwise it is quite likely to be noise in the data.  When you have one block in around 90 minutes and a small enough measurement period, it might appear to have a lower hash rate when in fact it is pure variance in finding a block.

The click bait, FUD type articles are rampant.

You don't want anonymity, publicize everything about yourself, but don't use force to impose your whims and beliefs in the rest of us. 

An animal lives in a state of perpetual transparency, a human does not if the human wants to be free. Just because you don't care about your liberty, don't sell the rest of us down the river to assuage your conscience.

I agree it is much less secure.  And one doesn't need crypto for that. There are plenty of solutions that don't need crypto to reach trustful consensus.

In which case it is a centralized coin that can be pressured to behave a particular way. Might as well have a centralized database.

Exactly. And I'd also add that a block chain in its own isn't worth a lot if the block chain isn't secured enough by something of value that helps to preclude it being rewritten in a reorganization.  The value of bitcoin helps secure the bitcoin block chain due to POW costs.

Block chain alone, without value is not worth a lot.

Just ask the people of Venezuela, Cyprus, China, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Turkey, Iran and Argentina recently and Cuba, North Korea, Germany, etc in the past if you want to understand why one might want to have a currency not controlled by governments and banks.  Plus transportable across borders.

Just like the people of Cyprus who didn't worry about the money in their banks in early 2013.  Then how much did the government seize?  Just like the people of Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba etc haven't worried about the money in their banks.  How much of the value was inflated away?  99.999999999999% in Venezuela. Only 95% in Argentina depending on when you start counting.

New supply drops because the number of coins created per block is cut in half, as explained above.

There is no guarantee it will impact price, in fact at the past halvings it hasn't immediately it has been months that it occurred because people have anticipated it.  If miners are selling many of their newly mined coins to cover costs and the number of new coins available on the market immediately drops by halve while new demand for coins remains the same, something will change in order to reach equilibrium of supply and demand.  Often that is price: half the number of new coins, unchanged demand for bitcoin means price increases.

Your static analysis ignores the fact that someone is purchasing the new supply and the number of coins available does not remain 17,947,512 but increases every block.

I love how a supposed news operation blatantly editorializes in their title.  I could understand a bit more if it was an editorial of course, but this purported to be a news item.  Seems it could be written by people who are enviously coveting and missed the boat on bitcoin.

150 BTC total?  If that is all they can afford I'd question the viability of the exchange.

Libra is a different beast. It's not decentralized and not censorship resistant.  Crypto is important because it takes power away from self-appointed power-hungry people and gives it to the regular people making it harder to take from them by force.  It's about freedom versus control. Authoritarianism versus liberty.

Perhaps the flaw is in the way Ran is explaining it?  Few people need to know how the internals of bitcoin work.  Few people, for example, need to understand that "addresses" really don't hold bitcoins, but bitcoins are a product of inputs and outputs.  People don't need to understand how CPU, GPU and now ASIC mining work specifically, just that it is a complicated function that can't be forged which provides security to the network.  The details don't matter. 

Just as the average person doesn't need to know everything about fiat, from the anti-counterfeiting protections, to how banks transport cash, to how the central banks inflate value away (they should know that part), etc.  Or most people couldn't explain all the parts of an automobile engine, or the internals of a television.

So, it isn't a flaw in bitcoin, it is someone with a poor understanding of what people need to know not doing a good job explaining what they need to know.

Trading vs using vs holding for investment purposes vs development vs ... .

At least (assuming the article is accurate which is often doubtful) they are leaving several options available.  Not that it really matters to the world at large, but probably really matters to their citizens.

It isn't really clear what OP is talking about, but the industry just needs people with common sense.  People who think it is reasonable to "earn" 5% per day with no risk don't have that.  Likewise these projects if they are awarding coins without doing some due diligence have no reason not to expect to get taken advantage of.  It is the projects that need to reform their practices.

It may be the political class' fault but if the history of Argentina tells us anything, the people won't choose the opposite, they will choose more of the same:  voting for the people who promote envy and promise "free" stuff.

Argentina won't. Their power-hungry political class won't let them.  They have demonstrated that for many, many decades.  Likewise, many citizens won't let them because they want "free" something so they'll continue to vote for socialism, fascism etc because they are greedy and want someone else to pay for their own choices and the consequences of those choices.

Individual citizens of Argentina might do so though, through self interest and individual choice.  That probably won't save Argentina, but it will save those people who are smart enough to make intelligent choices.

Nothing will save Argentina, Venezuela or anywhere else in the world as long as people think they have the right to vote themselves money that someone else earned.