Haha, love this:

http://thehackernews.com/2017/05/smb-exploit-cryptocurrency-mining.html

Crypto is finally finding its way

Not banks.  Central banks.   Well, first of all they should have a motivation - I was just answering the OP.  But they also should be legally allowed to do so (that is, have bitcoin on the list of assets they can buy, like they can buy gold, and certain securities).  I don't think any big central bank is allowed to emit money against bitcoin yet.

Ah, if you have your wealth in a low-liquidity asset, that's a problem, yes.  If you are holding old cars, and you want to buy a gift card, you have the same problem.
You first have to sell your non-liquid asset (here, an old car) to obtain a more liquid asset (cash, say), and then use it in commerce.

If you have very non-liquid bitcoins, you may have to wait for a few days to get your stuff on an exchange, but once it is there, you can buy liquid alt coins, and use it in commerce.

In fact, they can't but they don't dislike the fact that they can't. 

From the same place it came from with bitcoin: belief and greed.

This is one of the funny things in bitcoin: decentralization.  No boss, no hierarchy, no pilot in the plane.  Bitcoin was designed to guarantee (up to a level) that nobody could easily "cheat" ; that is, that nobody in the system could decide, upon his own, to change things, and *not respect the rules*.  Of course, in the beginning, this was not really true: when Satoshi was still the boss, he changed the rules several times.  However, these were "technical" rules.  His self-appointed heirs, the Core dev team, was in fact the only team taking over the development of the code implementing Satoshi's system when he disappeared.  So they have been the "boss" quite a while, and they too, did change quite a lot of technical details.  But none of these affected people (most of them weren't used in fact).  So people let them play and change rules for a while.

There was a ticking bomb that Satoshi himself had put into the bitcoin rules, and which people, back then, warned him about: the block size limit.  Satoshi publicly considered that this limit could easily be removed or changed if ever it was considered reasonable, but people pointed out to him that this was risky: after all, small blocks will make for high fees, and miners will like high fees.  As they are the ones that actually implement the protocol, they might, in fact, seriously hesitate to change it.

At a certain point, Core proposed some quite radical changes to bitcoin.  It goes under the name of Segwit.  It are a lot of technical improvements, a quite radical change of how the block chain is built, and in fact, also a preparation of a totally new way of transacting: the "Lightning Network".   The Lightning Network is an idea that could in principle allow one to use bitcoin transactions without writing them on the chain - only when you are scammed or your partners disappear, you could always "come back" to settle on the chain.  As such, Core considered that increasing the block chain was not going to motivate people on the LN, so they thought that it was a good idea to keep bitcoin's block chain small, and somehow force people off chain.  And they went on telling everywhere how supposedly dangerous it was to go beyond 1 MB blocks.

In the mean time, people were looking also to just do what Satoshi suggested, namely increasing the block size, so that more transactions could go on, but Core resisted, most probably thinking that if they gave in to increase the block size, the utility of their Lightning Network would remain theoretical, and people would always ask for more and more space on the block chain.  By doing so, some "resistance" appeared, that didn't consider Core's central control over bitcoin's rules as "natural".  

This is how Core lost its position as central decider on bitcoin's protocol, so now there is not really a central authority any more.

Once this central authority is gone from bitcoin, it being a decentralized system without "boss" that decides, and its design being such that if you deviate from the rules, you are essentially rejected by the system, nobody can actually really change anything any more, without risking to be rejected and losing a lot of value.  Bitcoin's system is entirely focussed on "no deviation from majority possible", and the majority is de facto the old rule system.  The first one that tries something else, and is not immediately certain of being followed by 70% of the others, will most probably lose all efforts in doing so: bitcoin was made that way.  If there was a central boss that decided for everybody, that would be quite easy.  But right now, with no very clear majority for ONE specific solution, it seems to be locked in to its current protocol.  And IF there is a central boss, then it isn't decentralized any more, which is its main selling point.

As such, it is difficult to see how bitcoin can still change what so ever to its rules.

But you can make many crypto currencies !  If all of them take the load of bitcoin, that's a lot more of transactions that are possible !  In fact, you can make as many crypto currencies as you like, so each time one is full, one can make another one.

Now that bitcoin is full, there is for instance litecoin (but you can also use others like DASH, ETH, ... ) to do payments.  When those are full, we can still consume a lot of coins that already exist.  When all of them are full, we can make many, many more.

In fact, with what is out there, we could already scale a factor of 500 or something (the number of coins that are already running).

The problem is that fiat money is absolutely not what caused the banking crisis of 2007, but rather, wild speculation was.  At no point, it was any monetary policy from central banks that was a direct cause of the crisis, but rather the fact that risky assets (non-solvable loans) were packaged in far too complex derivatives, on which financial institutions gambled and speculated with their balance sheets.   When highly speculative assets come down, blood flows.  That was the 2007 banking crisis.  Not the fact that fiat is slightly inflationary (*).

Now, we all know that rare collectibles get their value from speculation, and lead to hoarding, not something that makes a good currency.   A good currency is only accepted because you want to spend it again, but you do normally not speculate on the value of currency (there are forex markets, but they don't make the currency price, they just surf on it).

So it is somewhat ironic that bitcoin, who *pretended* to become cash, was emitted as a scarce collectible, to become a highly speculative asset, while at the same time, pretending to fight the causes of the speculation crisis of the banks in 2007, and replace the system that is working well (the fiat system).

In fact, you cannot get rich (or poor) with a good cash system.  If you can get rich (or poor) with it, it is a speculative asset, and if it is a speculative asset it is not good cash.

(*) at least, not directly.  There is a link with too easy loans which was encouraged by low interest rates, which were low to be able to obtain some inflation.

This is a good summary !

All depends of course HOW ECDS is cracked.  While "an attacker needs 6 months" versus "an attacker has only 10 minutes" SOUNDS totally different, in matters of cryptographic security, in fact, the difference is near nothing.  In fact, some time ago, I fell myself in the trap, so I'm explaining what I got wrong, so that others don't get it wrong.

Cryptographic security is usually expressed grossly in "bit level".  If a system has a security of, say 64 bits, it grossly means that the amount of trials an attacker needs to perform, is 2^64.  A "trial" is of the same level of individual difficulty as the "normal single operation" the normal user needs to do to sign/check/encrypt/... whatever is the purpose of the system.

The ECDS system used by bitcoin has keys of 256 bits, and, because a general attack is known on this type of systems (called "Pollard rho" method), has a security which is half the key length, that is: 128 bits.  In other words, if I'm given a 256 bit public key, using Pollard rho method, I need about 2^128 trials to find the private key that goes with it.  That's in general considered not feasible for the foreseeable future, so it is considered strongly secure.

If ECDS is "cracked", it means that a new method is available that can calculate the private key in MUCH LESS than 2^128 trials.  In fact, the type of curve Satoshi used, a Koblitz curve, is known to undergo an attack that can win a few bits, but not much (at least, what is publicly known).

Seriously cracked means, for instance, that the security level goes down to 60 bits, or 50 bits or 90 bits... depending on the attack method.  As we don't know the method, we can't know what will be the "level of cracking".

Now, suppose that an attacker can do it in 6 months.  It would mean that he can crack an n-bit security in 6 months.  How much lower must the security go for him to be able to do it in 10 minutes ?  This is 26000 times shorter.  It means, something like 15 bits less security.

So the difference between "cracking in 6 months" and "cracking in 10 minutes" is 16 bits of security.  If we already came down from, say, 128 bits nominal ECDS security to, say, 70 bits (so that it can be done in 6 months, say), it is hard to say that going down to 55 bits is not going to happen soon !

So, essentially, when the "long term" ECDS protection is broken, chances are that the short term protection isn't going to help either.  There's only 16 bits of security difference between them.

As to quantum computers, sufficiently large quantum computers can crack ECDS *completely*.  It essentially means that no matter the length of the key, such a computer can crack it in a matter of milliseconds.  In fact, the only thing is that the bigger the key (the more bits in the key) the *bigger* the quantum computer needs to be, but not so much the longer it takes for it to crack the key.

If you have an open business, and the only thing you want is a payment, not "investment/gambling/...." I guess that LTC is a good choice today.  If you want to hide stuff, I'd think of monero.

It is extremely easy for any big central bank to take over any collectible.  The only thing that is needed, is that there's a legal frame in which the central bank is allowed to buy said asset as a backing.  Central banks are fairly restricted in the kinds of assets they may buy up to deliver printed fiat, but if bitcoin is part of that list, then that central bank can just print as much money as needed to buy up the stash of bitcoin it needs.   The reason for that is that the more bitcoin is worth, the that banks' backing allows it to print money to buy it.

As such, that central bank can pump up the price of said asset sky high, and print the necessary money to buy whatever it needs without real economic costs.  In other words, a central bank can corner any market of finite supply.  Once she's done that, slowly enough for enough OTHER people to buy a fair amount of bitcoin, she dumps it like crazy, crashes the market, and makes all those invested in it totally burned.  If that didn't cut it, rinse and repeat. 

Central banks cannot do this to other currencies, because other currencies are elastic too and cannot be cornered.  But collectibles are easily cornered by a central bank.

As long as a central bank is not legally allowed to buy coins, it cannot happen, but once an asset is declared suitable as a backing for a central bank, she can totally master the asset (unless she enters in competition with a foreign central bank doing the same of course).

There will be no "mainstream adoption" if you think of currency usage.  That's bollocks.  What's possible is that the financial world will integrate some block chain tech.  What's for sure is that the crypto scene will evolve into a HUGE speculative game, which will be entirely dominated by financial players once they have the permission to get into it, but it will most probably be played by a minority of the world population (mainly at loss, to pump their money into the financial institutions that play better on it).

In other words, there will be some fin tech coming out of this, in the real world ; and the crypto market will be another speculative market where small players lose their money to big players, thinking they can outsmart them.  I think big finance and banks will just love speculative crypto.

And yes, there will be a currency usage, for underground small communities that need financing things that cannot be done openly and with fiat money (murder on command, dark markets in general, fiscal hiding, terrorism....), the real economic value of crypto currency, but that is not mainstream.

If the question is: will more than 10% of the world population ever use crypto directly ?  No of course not.

You don't need a block chain to trade its IOU on exchanges.

That's why it was invented in the first place: to be able to pay those things society doesn't want you to pay, and to hide the payment of those things you don't want people to know you paid it.  Essentially, that's everything which covers dark markets, weapons, murder, terrorism, bribing, ransom, subversion, forbidden political action, hidden cartel formation, ....
It is exactly this kind of freedom of action for which crypto is invented, and one shouldn't be surprised that it finds its domain of application.  It is one of the reasons why I was enthusiastic about crypto, because it gives back this freedom to people, against society.

I fully agree with that view.  They will only need to find a way to stabilize their coins somehow, but if they hold back a significant reserve, they can play FED that way, once it is big enough.  The difficulty of banks to settle internationally (where there is no common point of trust, the central bank) can indeed be solved with such an instrument, if there is going to be a way to limit volatility risk.  It can be a huge inter-bank settlement layer, which is what I think Ripple wants to become.  They are not embroiled in any decentralized difficulty ; ripple is willingly a centralized crypto ; this will allow them to take advantage of several aspects of crypto, without its problems due to total trustlessness, which is not needed on that level.

This is something I've been claiming for quite a while, I'm not aware of any tweets or anything, I just came, totally by myself, to that (rather obvious) conclusion by studying the system.  I've tried to explain that several times here, the reasoning is not so difficult to follow, and doesn't need any authority because it is a logical deduction from the known technical aspects of bitcoin - but if anything, it was the exact reason of why PoW was introduced in the first place.

That said, the fact that Satoshi introduced PoW to *deny full nodes any consensus decision power* is, in itself, not a logical proof: it would be a fallacy as I've been lining out several others of committing the error of taking a desirable goal as a logical consequence.  So it is not because Satoshi *wanted* full nodes not to have any consensus decision power, that this is the case.  It is simply the case because if you do the *Gedanken experiment* where all non-mining full nodes try to enforce a protocol change, and all the miners keep on their protocol, it are the miners that win, and the full nodes that stop.  I consider that as the logical proof that purely technically, full nodes don't decide anything, nor about the building of the block chain, nor about the protocol it has to obey.
At best, full nodes can *signal* a kind of desire by users - but they are not representative of users.  Less than 1% of users runs a full node, and maybe many of them aren't even strongly attached to the "signal" of their node, they just want running software.  >99% of users don't have full nodes ; nobody knows what is the economical weight of the full node owners who are strongly politically committed to one or another choice, so nobody can have an idea what block chain would get most of the market cap after an eventual hard fork (which is what full nodes, at best, could signal, if they were economically representative, which they aren't).

Miners make the block chain(s) ; users vote on it with their money on exchanges.  Miners sell block chain to users, who pay for it by buying the coins miners obtain that way.  Users "buy block chain" because they have reasons to want to use it (for transactions, for speculation, ....) That's the economic model of a PoW crypto currency.  Full nodes are proxy servers putting themselves in between the miners and the users, which have as limited use, the fact that users don't have to have a direct internet connection to miners, but can use also a P2P network to obtain their certified transactions on the chain, and to send their transactions to the miners who will hopefully include them in the chain they collectively produce.  If direct internet connections are possible, the use of full node proxy servers is questionable.  If direct internet connections are problematic, the full node proxy servers have a useful communication role.

Full nodes can be useful for their owners: checking what happens (without power to act) ; deniability of sending one's own transactions.  Fun.

I think it is much more complicated than that, but the essential problem of Greece is that an economy that was used to an inflationary currency and a state that was used to cover its ill-controlled finances with extra loans in an easily obtained own currency (which was at the root of the inflationary currency), suddenly got propelled into a much stricter financial system, with a very low inflation currency (the Euro), where loans weren't tempered by inflation "on command".   In fact, Greece was simply economically not ready to join the Euro zone, but this was done for essentially geopolitical reasons.  Goldman Sachs accepted the mission to falsify the Greek books so that the political goal could be met.

In the beginning, the state and the economy continued to live like before, but with a much stronger currency, which lead them to believe in an apparent sudden wealth.   Moreover, the Greek state borrowing money like crazy, was the feast of German banks !  Everything seemed to go for the best.  Do you know that Greece, at a certain point, was the highest importer of Porsche sports cars per capita ?  They spend themselves to ruins with the Olympic Games in 2004.

However, when pay day came, things became more difficult.  The Greek state and the Greek economy were used to push debts away with inflation - this was not possible any more with the Euro.   Their way of handling money was simply adapted to a highly inflationary currency, and their fast integration into a strong currency system made them live a lot above their means for a while, and put them into debt beyond what was reasonable.

Put the international banking crisis on top of that, and the story is complete.


I agree, but this could have been solved in exactly the same way without doing that: putting a tax of 50% on all possession.

I'm always amazed at how people seem to think that the financial system is "stealing" them, while they pay 10 times more taxes than what they lose in the financial system.   If inflation is a form of theft, then it is of the order of 2%.  Nobody pays 2% of taxes.  I pay around 60% or so if I count everything (social security, income tax, VAT, propriety tax, local tax....).  I couldn't care less about those 2% or so.

I simply think that economist's understanding of things like money improved over the years.  A bit like medical knowledge improved over the years, and that medical theories from beginning the 20th century are maybe less accurate than those of end of the 20th century.


This is what I count under "conspiracy": that bogus scientists are just ass-licking power, and that all academics in the whole world nicely repeat that, and even though they could perfectly understand why it is wrong, they conspire in continuing to tell bullshit for their master's sake.

My simple point was that the Austrian vision, namely that a collectible is perfect money, has serious problems of stability.  I don't even think the Austrians deny this.  What the Austrians do, is to prefer this monetary stability over having central power that regulates its value, because they consider this regulatory aspect as a source of corruption.   They are right of course that it is a source of corruption.  But that doesn't mean that collectibles are good money: they simply revert to collectibles because they hate so much central control, that they couldn't think of anything else.  

However, people have been thinking more about the ideal functions of money, what money should do and not do, if it were to accomplish its function better, and most probably Nash's definition comes closest to what ideal money's behaviour is.  The reason is that if money behaves differently, it has undesirable consequences, essentially by replacing value in a non-ideal allocative way.  Seigniorage is such an example.  There is no "economic merit" in acquiring value from others, simply because one is printing money, or simply because one is sitting on a stash of money.  This doesn't allocate means in any efficient way, and doesn't solve economic problems for anybody.  

Money as an economic lubricant works best when it has a stable value on which one can count, that's essentially the conclusion of economists.  However, it is not because an abstract model of money is like that, that one knows how to make an asset that works like this.  The Austrians couldn't think of anything else but a collectible, but a collectible doesn't behave, by far, as ideal money, simply because it is an inelastic offer that confronts a variable demand.

If one could make a monetary system that has stable value, that would always be better money than a collectible.  Fiat money tries to implement that.  The problem with fiat money is when the regulator of the money supply also has political goals, and if one of these goals is to give seigniorage to the state, the compromise is to make a slightly inflationary money: that gives enough seigniorage to the political caste, while at the same time providing an asset to the market that approaches ideal money: its value is not entirely stable, but is predictable.
 
What crypto currrencies pretend to do, it to take the corruption of central control out of the system.  However, bitcoin and most alt coins revert back to Austrian visions of collectibles, which are not stable.  What crypto currencies should have done, was to take more advanced visions of money from modern economy, and implement that in a non-centrally controlled way.  I've indicated a way to do that.

It is ironic that bitcoin, which wants to "fight" the "corruption" of central control (which comes down essentially to seigniorage, that is, giving loans to the state), has itself a HUGE seigniorage effect because of its instability.  The seigniorage is not "during its life time" but "at its beginning", and is far worse than any central bank has ever done.  If ever bitcoin achieves its goal of "replacing fiat", it will have made a few early adopters more rich due to early-printer seigniorage than the entire US government over many years !


I know rather well Austrian economy, I'm actually quite favourable to many of their arguments.  However, it is an OLD school.  Understanding has evolved since. On the monetary issues, they only had embrionic understanding, and economists evolved since then.   Austrian's vision on how money came about is simply wrong, and historically invalidated.  Nowhere, ever, a rare commodity evolved into a currency all by itself and market forces.  I know very well Rothbard's work, and it is appreciable as a critique of central control, but it is not a good theory of money.  It is a theory of how we could do without central banks, and they could only think of collectibles.
You should also read David Graebers' Debt, the first 5000 years.  It has a much better historical account of money than the Austrians.
In any case, bitcoin solved the issue of central control, but put in the wrong issuing function, to turn it into a rare collectible, with huge initial seigniorage, instead of turning it into a stable currency without seigniorage, even though all the technical elements were on the table.  As such, it does behave as a rare collectible, and not as a stable currency, because that's how it was designed.

The problem with many of these theories is that they are conspirational.  I also consider the state as the enemy of the people, but not as a conspiracy.  The state is simply a powerful entity, made of humans, and as all humans are enemies of other humans, of course the state is a powerful enemy.  There's nothing special about that.  However, the "new elite" that would emerge if ever bitcoin became world currency, that is, the profiteers of early adoption, are most probably just as bad as current states are.  Enemies are there were collectivity and community spirit is important.  Whether that's a state, a corporation, a wealthy group of people or just a large collection of friends doesn't matter.   The state is no exception to that.  But the state has nothing special apart from being the current winner of the law of the strongest.  Take it away, and another one will win the law of the strongest.   There's nothing special about that: we are social animals, which means that we want to dominate, or be dominated, we want to abuse, or be abused, we want to extort, or be extorted.  It is just our nature.  No conspiracy.  We're just like that.
As such, bitcoin, as it is designed, is only a palace revolution.  It replaces the powerful and corrupt (that is, humans) by other powerful and corrupt.  It is not a design of ideal money at all.

I think most USERS want only to be able to transact, and don't care much about the technology that allows them to.   Whether that's LN, bigger blocks or whatever, and whether they have to connect to this or that node with their wallet doesn't really matter to most of them.  By far MOST USERS DON'T RUN NODES.  When I started out with bitcoin, I used a light wallet (electrum).   I only started a full node much later, when I wanted to study the block chain with a hex editor.  I couldn't care less about having a full node for my own few bitcoins that I bought to buy stuff on the internet.    Later, I learned the privacy aspects of a full node, which is what interests me most.


Indeed, exchanges have only a preference for anything that induces exchanging coins, on which they win a fee.  A bitcoin fork in two coins would bring them a fortune, as probably all of the coins would get exchanged from one version to the other: think of the fee on that !

==> this is why I think that believing that users and exchanges are going to grip miners by the throat to force them one way or another, is naive: users want to transact (no matter how), exchanges want their customers to be able to exchange (no matter how).  

The religious wars between technical approaches doesn't affect them much, from the moment the thing is working.


Well, how representative are the few thousand nodes for the users of bitcoin (the stake, say) ?  If there are of the order of a million users, why should 6000 of them be representative ?  Mostly they are the most geeky ones, the mostly "politically" involved, etc... but are they the real convincing force of the user base (the guys and galls that spend money on it on exchanges, that trade it,.... ) ?


It would take a brave miner to willingly deviate from miner consensus, which is de facto the current protocol.  Even though miners can signal without cost what are their preferences, truly hard forking AWAY from the existing consensus takes balls.


Well, if there is "miner collusion", a full node can inform you.  But there's not much you can do about it (apart from maybe trying to cash out as quickly as possible, before the market fully realizes what happens... or doesn't care).

As I said before, miners are "locked in" to the current protocol, and it would take balls and foolishness to fork away on one's own.  It is only when miners would be strongly convinced that they can fork away with a large majority, that they will tempt the adventure.  In doing so, they will try to save their income as well as bitcoin itself.  Most probably, it are the miners that would only dare to fork if they are mutually convinced of such a large majority between them that the old chain has little chance to survive.  For that, they must be sure to be more than 80% or 90%.  ETH/ETC showed that even 10% can survive.  With bitcoin, it is true that the slow retargetting of difficulty makes the minority chain probably die technically.  But it would be deadly if "original bitcoin" survived.

So no wonder miners are never forking away from the current protocol.  

In my opinion, full nodes don't play any role in this.  Miners are just locked in themselves, and it is only a huge agreement amongst them that will make them deviate from the current protocol.  Whatever full nodes say.

There is something that is disturbing in this story.  Miners HAVE hardforked in the past over block size.  It was not so much in the node code, but when they increased the block sizes they accepted amongst themselves from 100 KB to 200 KB to 500 KB to 1 MB, these WERE technically speaking, hard forks of the *actual protocol*.  

The argument that one shouldn't go beyond 1 MB, because this would harm the number of full nodes, and this would harm the decentralization of bitcoin, while if there's one number in bitcoin that doesn't matter in the power game, it is the number of full nodes, is disturbing, because that argument is simply wrong.

Now, IF you admit that that argument is wrong, and that a high number of full nodes are not a part of the decentralized power structure, then there is nothing that stops one from increasing the block size somewhat.  Like it used to be done.

But this looks like kicking the can along the road.  That's true.  Only, nobody knows where the road leads to.  It most probably DOESN'T lead to a global VISA-like payment system, and in any case that's not the problem right now.

As I argued elsewhere, LN is *probably* a neat invention, but it is a totally different trust model - unless you can EASILY settle on chain.  If the chain is congested, LN sounds dangerous,  much more dangerous than less full nodes that have nothing to say in any case. LN can only be trustless and permissionless with a chain that can, without any doubt, absorb at any instance, all settlements, at any moment.

So the block chain needs to have AT LEAST the full settling potential of the entire LN network.  Proposing LN without an essentially unlimited block chain is totally changing the trust model that bitcoin users were used to.  That doesn't mean that LN will not find its way.  It can be fast, it is more anonymous in certain ways etc...  But all this has still to be put into music in practice.  It is a totally different way of transacting.

As such, using a bogus argument against potentially big blocks, and by doing so, not allowing the natural tendency that miners had, namely, effective hard forks increasing stepwise the actual block chain, causes fundamental problems:

1) it severely harms current users
2) it has killed the unity of miners, and has hence locked in the current protocol
3) it renders any eventual future LN not trustless and permissionless
4) if bitcoin doesn't really need much more room ever, because it levels off at a much, much lower point than "VISA levels", it has locked out the natural equilibrium end point of bitcoin.

All that in order to save a number of nodes that have no influence on the power structure in bitcoin, apart from "shouting out their preference"  ; numbers that are easily manipulated by any big player in the field, BTW (Sybil) which was exactly why this number was made not to matter in the first place.

I fully agree that bitcoin has been a fundamental game changer, but probably not there where one thought it would be.  It is not so much the "payment system" that is the game changer.  Yes, you can transact value with bitcoin.  But essentially, you're *mostly* still jumping in and out of bitcoin before and after transaction, through centralized exchanges, and bank accounts.  Sure, you can occasionally buy something with bitcoin.  Yes, you can sell something for bitcoin.  But, apart from dark markets, this is not where it was a game changer.

The *real* game changer that bitcoin brought, was that, together with alt coins, this has brought highly speculative finance directly to the common of mortals including those with a lot of money but no serious access to regulated finance.  Highly speculative finance is not the exclusive domain of financial institutions any more, and the common of mortals can now access a world of hard speculation through a simple exchange, without any rules, and doesn't need the controlled and expensive access through financial institutions any more.  A whole NEW SPECULATIVE FINANCE world is born with bitcoin and alt coins ; one where relatively important fortunes can be made and destroyed with much higher volatility than in the wildest of dreams in the front rooms of big financial institutions.

Bitcoin has liberated financial speculation from being locked up in the world of regulated big finance, and brought a very raw form to the mere mortals.  THIS is where bitcoin has been a game changer ; especially with the relatively high market caps around that allow to gamble big money.

To me, this is quite ironic, as Bitcoins' genesis block contains a reference to the banking crisis of 2007-2008, which was the result of too risky speculation.  People have taken this as a critique of the speculative financial institutions, but in fact, bitcoin was the start of a much wilder speculative adventure, that is only beginning, now that bitcoin is "averaging out" with alt coins, making for a REALLY WILD gambler's market, far beyond the wildness of what brought us the crisis of 2007 (or of 1929, for that matter).  Watch it grow to unseen heights.