But it is a huge pain to send bitcoins when you want to use them as soon as possible. If you need 3-6 confirmations you could get stuck for few hours.

Support is barely holding w no volume.  Looks like massive breakdown will ensue

I doubt it will be a problem. The retarget might be steep, but to be honest miners are an exceptionally irrational bunch. Moreso than catcoin.

Besides, it's winter in the northern hemisphere and Bitcoin would have to go a lot lower before the value of the heat generated by a miner loses it's edge over natural gas.

Wow things are not looking well...
Maybe it's time to finally get my coins out of cold storage... (not sure if I want to though as I have to put all money on exchange. If it were to somehow get hacked agani, I'll be fucked..)

There is a risk that if too many miners go offline block creation may stall.

I know that there are people who care for bitcoin for "ideological" reasons, and would get very upset about any deviation from what they perceive as the "core values" of the project.  (Mircea Popescu's "war declaration" about increasing the block size is an example of that.)

However, I believe that the ideologues are a very small fraction of the people involved in the bicoin "industry", and have very little power over it -- economic, computational, or managerial.  I believe that the vast majority of the bitcoiners (say, 99.9%) do not care about those "core values", and would not be upset if they are violated.  On the contrary, the major players would use their economic power to convince everyody that the violations are unimportant, or even good for bitcoin.

In fact, I believe that many of the "ideological" supporters would choose to conform to some violations of the principles, rather than see the project collapse because of "civil war".

I see that already happening now, about the centralization of mining.  True believers should have committed suicide the moment that GHash.io got more than 50% of the hashpower.  Instead, people preferred to believe the argument that a majority miner (or coalition of 4-5 miners)  would never want do any of the naughty things that it could do, because of "the incentives"; and just carried on.

I'm just gonna step in and say that while the ripple network requires some degree of counter-party risk with gateways to move any currency in the network, XRP (its native currency) is 100% decentralised like BTC. Only its distribution is centralised, aside from that, to send XRPs around it's basically the same thing as BTC, but without POW and instantly.

But again, most of the time the counter-party free aspect of bitcoin is mostly related to the privacy-paranoia vague narratives of bitcoin in the first place.

If you want people to take you seriously, you need to improve your written english.

Threw /= Through   (I know they sound the same).

You sort "the wheat from the chaff" (chaff is the hull of the wheat which is not digestible in humans but is often used for livestock fodder)

Everyone will lose interest in this and every other public forum. The next crypto will be supported and premined by central banks. There will be nobody that cares about your trolling then.

Can you quantify that 'faith of the community' in dollars?  Starting from: what percentage of the bitcoin holders and traders would understand what that piechart means, or care about it?

AFAIK, the only way to tell whether a 'starving attack' is going on would be this chart
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=56&scale=0
(Note that it is smoothed by 56-day running averaging, check the URL).  It shows that one found block gets discarded every 16 hours or so (because the next block found does not use it as parent).  Note the chart is zero before Mar/2014; I don't know whether the count was really zero, or just there is no data for that period.  

Anywy, these orphan blocks may be just accidents, or maybe some miner is doing something like Sirer's selfish mining attack.

If a coalition with 60% of the hashpower were really trying to steal an unfair share of the rewards, we probably would see many more orphan blocks. Or maybe not, I don't know.  Perhaps the coalition (that could deploy thousands of relay nodes of their own) would find a way to cloak the attack and/or hide the identity of the attackers.