Again, it doesn't matter what we decide to do here.  Literally no one, inside or outside of this forum, gives a flying f##k what our opinion on the proper bitcoin unit may be.

Including me.

Not if Undefeatable pulls of his epic bitcoin hack!  I'm still waiting to find out he intends to do it.  I'm sure he's go a great plan, such as hijacking the computer science lab to make a beoulf cluster to brute force the blockchain!

Panic!  Sell everything!

As a gift to the membership here, I just want to say that I'm willing to take those worthless bitcoins of of your hands for the generous offer of $1 each.

The bitcoin defenders are poor in understanding here, particularly the first one, but Peter does make some good points here.  Gold cannot go to a use value of zero, while it's possible that Bitcoins can.  Granted, if gold were to drop to it's 'intrinsic value' it would be somewhat comparable to the value of lead, maybe slightly more due to much lower toxicity, but close.  Considering that refined lead is under a dollar a pound right now, that would represent something on the order of a 99.99% loss in value.  "You didn't lose everything, you've still got .01% of your life savings!  Don't Jump!"

While it's possible for bitcoins to go to zero, the only way that happens now is if there is some tragic & unfixable flaw discovered in the protocol that gives Bitcoin it's 'intrinsic value' to start with.  Again, possible; but the tragic and unfixable flaws with using electronic precious metal deposit receipts as an online trade currency are, if not altogether obvious, already demonstrated by the folding of both Egold.com and the persecution of the Liberty Dollar.  Governments will not suffer any competitor to exist if they can help it, but they can't help it with Bitcoin.

That last caller seemed to know his stuff, but was cut off by Peter before he could actually finish the argument.

Good luck with that.

Of course not.

Who said anything about your lifetime?

Short answer - yes.

Long answer - yes.

And currently there are only just over 11 million BTC in circulation, so the average address has about 1 BTC.  If the odds of such a thing occuring to you, by random bad luck or otherwise, simply divide your massive bitcoin wealth up into a few addresses.

As long as the transaction total is over .05 BTC, you shouldn't have many issues.

Maybe, maybe not.  That depends on a lot of variables, some of which are controllable.  Even if so, the existence & validity of the transaction is provable.  If one were sending them somewhere that one could wait for, such as a donation or sending it to oneself for consolidation, the time frame to confirmation would be less of an issue.

In fairness, SHA-256 isn't used to create bitcoin addresses, it's used to secure the blockchain.  The current address algo is 168 bit, IIRC; but if it ever looks to be at risk, it can be upgraded.  The first character of the address is what denotes the address version.  The primary reason that there is no 2xxx... address types yet is because there isn't really a better algo to migrate towards.

There are also ways to merge wallets, so by the time there is enough dust to spend, even having them in seperate wallets shouldn't be an issue.  That's assuming that the dust do not grow in value in the meantime to the point that the minimum fee is below the dust value.

Yes.

The effect you're referencing is called 'normalcy bias', the general belief (however false, intellectually) that bad things aren't going to happen to us because they never really have.  The problem with this statement, is that statistics and mathmatics don't have a normalcy bias.  Whatever can happen, eventually will; but whatever cannot happen, will not.  While it's not actually impossible for a random address keypair collision to occur, the odds are astronomically unlikely.  The odds that a potted petunia and an adult whale were to pop into existence 20 miles above the surface of the Earth is about as likely as any single individual, or even all of us, have of forcing a single keypair collision within our own natural lifespans.

While that's a cute little retort, it's not actually true.  A great many people, both wealthy and otherwise, do use gold as money, or at least as a "store of value".  http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article43069.html

And India is far from the only group to continue to value gold for it's monetary properties.  The "western" nations are fairly unique in the total abandonment of hard currency principles in favor of ever increasing abstractions.  While the average, middle classs American adult has near zero experience with gold or silver coins, that's not true for the average, middle class Chinese adult or the average middle class South American adult.  There is a high, and perhaps even deserved, trust in the US federal reserver note as well as the Euro.  That trust can turn in an instant.

Good idea, but don't you think that DPR would also have a salt? 

That's not what I'm talking about at all.  On that point, Peter is correct.  Bitcoin is not gold, but nor is it fiat.  It's something altogether new and different from either, that is designed to do the best job of either. 

What I'm talking about is Peter's talk about intrinsic value.  Not only is gold's "intrinsic value" such a small part of it's market value as to be practically irrelevent, he argues that bitcoin's don't have an intrinsic value economicly.  I can easily prove that they do.  The only kind of intrinsic value of anything, is how useful it is to the marketplace. While gold does have physical properties that are useful to industry, and silver has chemical properties useful to both industry and medicine; neither of these 'intrinsic' uses have value to the market to compete with their monetary uses, because the market will always be looking for methods of achieving the same ends using cheaper inputs.  A great example is the use of silver in antibacterial products; while it works great and has been well known to medicine for over a century, silver is not often used in medicine except in the most dire of applications, wherein our modern anti-bacterial sciences fail us too regularly.  I.E. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus  While bitcoins have no physical properties to exploit, they were designed to significantly uncut the market costs of the transfer of value over distances.  This 'feature' alone provides bitcoin's "intrinsic value", even if it's next least expensive competitor in kind is what most determines what that "intrinsic value" should actually be.  Neither Visa nor Western-Union have the power to undercut Bitcoin in this market, without first becoming Bitcoin themselves.

And that is not even considering the "intrinsic value" of blockchain enforcible digital contracts, should they ever become common.

Well, that radio show completely undermines my own faith in Peter.

Of course they do.  Neither is really in charge of anything.

Let's get back on topic, please.

Now, with precision, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?