Sadly w/ consumer protection comes centralization, comes banking institutions etc etc... everything bitcoin is not meant to be. The only consumer protection is using one's own brain and since there is an evergrowing amount of people in this world that dont want to use their brain... people will continue to shy away from Bitcoin.
Even tho Bitcoin carries many of the responsibilities of transacting similar to using cash, the one thing you cant do w/ bitcoin is beat the shit out of the person who ran away w/ ur bitcoin because u have no idea who that person is.
Bitcoin has many other issues / hurdles to overcome before ever being taken seriously as a world dominant currency. On the supply side of things the chance of a 51% attack needs to be destroyed. As long as the 51% attack is possible Bitcoin is not fully 'trustless', sure its 'trustless' as long as the network of miners plays nice.
Also, the possibility of all the coins being forever lost / unuseable due to user ignorance / retardedness is a huge isssue as well. Just look at the guy who lost 7.5k BTC in the dump/landfill.
The major difference between something like gold vs BTC, sure BTC has many strengths against gold but one of its HUGE weaknesses is all bitcoin can over time become unuseable. Gold is at least always around, it just changes hands / owners.

Another one as of late is, Im getting tired of all these entities being able to scam each other so easily and get away with it, using Bitcoin. The ratio of scams to legit business in Bitcoin GIGANTIC in comparison to fiat scams vs legit business. Its fucking sad =(
AM recently proved that even the most reputable Bitcoin based businesses are fucking scammers n scum right from the get-go. How can Bitcoin ever become dominant if nearly every person involved is a fucking untrustworthy scumbag?!

Better than gold? Sure, in many ways it is except for one important fact. Bitcoin can be lost, unuseable forever. Gold is always 'somewhere'. Thats one scary thing bout Bitcoin, image decent % of the globe of people using it and we have stupid fucks like the guy who lost 7.5k BTC on a HDD in a landfill, give it a few years and there will be no Bitcoin left for people to use.
I love Bitcoin but it has some huge shortcomings before it can dominate as a world currency =/

On one hand the self management of clocks is great on the other, its sad for those who want to tweak each chip freq individually. I think they could run much more efficiently if we could hand tune clocks / voltages. When these autotune they tend to drop clocks down way to far for any given voltage to stay at a 0 HW error rate. Whereas in the real world up to 2% is fine and generally more GH / sec can be had up to 2% then just staying at 0% ... without consuming much more power.

Just throwing something out there that just now popped in my head...
Wouldnt it have been wiser to make the block target time greater than 4mins? This would allow for HDD's lasting longer and lower power consumption....
Not sure of the downfalls tho....

If a simple password was used to encrypt the wallet / keys then its easy to confiscate, takes a trivial amount of computing power in such case. Many human generated passwords are easy to crack. Also, there is the possibility of a wallet not being encrypted at all like a plain text paper wallet.

OP, all the previous bubbles had 'cooldowns' of significantly more time then it took to form the bubble.
Bitcoin always went 'dark' before it exploded in more popularity ... I suspect thats where we are again ... gearing up for round 4 =)
Of course we could be in this rut for quite a long time then the others, who knows.
It was a good 1.5-2years from the $30 bubble to the $266 =) , in between we were stuck between $2-$10

You can go find a girlfriend that makes u throw away the hard drive that has ur wallet on it. That way  a lil while later u'd be sifting through the local garbage dump, crying...
Reminds me of a story.... oh wait...

I heard about it the summer of 2011 when it hit its $30 bubble. I was confused as hell by wtf it was for a good 2 weeks, then started mining w/ a single gpu and learning and every day since then continued to be in awe of its utility and whoever designed it!

Its gotta be an april fools joke lol

Too bad price aint growing with it =( more storage just means more dumpage =(

Yeah, OP keep in mind alt coin mining is even more risky than BTC mining simply because of the alt price trading factor. Also, while on paper for some coins it seems more profitable, the reality is... once u start mining it .. depending on the algo, diff changes can be very quick causing it to be unprofitable within minutes of mining. I remember some coins would swing in and out of profitability ever 10 minutes due to their diff algo. Meanwhile coinwarz will only show a 'snapshot' diff in time, often times fooling you to thinking diff is pegged really low =)

Yeah, diff has simply slowed down a lot due to the price being so low, if btc was still $1300 ... diff would most likely be a couple hundred billion by now. IIRC when btc price was its highest AM had announced projections of bringing 2EHASH of hardware online within a year. Which, thankfully never happened. Falling prices curbed them real fast!
Like I always say, mining follows price. So far thats proven nothing but true. Its already happened w/ LTC.

WOW! Everyone start offloading ur HDDs now lol!

Id like to join if possible =)

Name: GenTarkin
Position: Legendary
Bitcoin Address: 12jjayHWtUci3ygPXD4i2yUHMySytiUBd4
Link to recent posts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=34888;sa=showPosts

The way things are going, if they keep going, soon we will only have the ASIC manufacturers mining ... noone else.

Yeah, at this point its not just variance, its been a solid past week or so of this insane hashrate increase.

I bet it hits somewhere near 25% =P

Increasing security?!?!? are you that ignorant? A single entity could easily put in an order for all the new hashrate coming online and because all the ASIC suppliers dont give 2 shits about the health of BTC, of course they would sell to that entity. So, its just more opportunity for a agency / government to swoop in and build up over 50% network hashrate then easily attack it, undermining bitcoin.
It can happen at any fucking diff....

The only security or 'trustless' state that bitcoin will ever achieve is when the chance of a 51% attack is nil or never even possible. Till then u still have to trust the people involved in bitcoin, its not so 'trustless' like everyone touts.

But everyone just ignores that fact and pretends its not an issue... its a GIGANTIC issue that needs to be resolved before Bitcoin can ever become 'mainstream'

Anyways, yeah tangents I know but....fuck this community needs to wake the fuck up.

ROFL.... dumb huh? ... I dont think so fool.
Yes megamines are killing bitcoin's price at least, cuz all they do is dump dump dump, putting insane downward pressure on the price. Megamines are in it for sheer profitability not the healthiness of the network. They dont give a fuck, they just want their fiat wealth, some of them become cloud services then run away w/ hardware backing that cloud service then rip off all their investors *points at AM*

The BTC community has become one of the least trustworthy communities Ive ever seen in my life, theres nothing but scum around these parts. Even the highly trusted AM has proven noone should be trusted when it comes to BTC.

The majority of my 'legendary' status comes from good ol GPU mining days, the way it should fucking be. Not this twisted generation of suppliers & miners who are out to just backstab each other.

What I hope happens at some point btc price plummets sub 100, many miners including farms cant afford to mine, asic demand is significantly lowered, asic companies go bankrupt and diff would start to go down significantly.
This would be nice.

Thanks for the insight =) I hope ur right! =)