Q1: What prevents the gvmnt from flicking on one their Main Frame computers / data centres and mine the whole lot or the rest of it. There are a number of sites who can do more than 1 peta floating point operations per second.
They'll have to do better than that. The combined computational power of current Bitcoin miners is the equivalent of 3
exaFLOPS.
If this is a "threat" indeed to what they've been controlling us with, or say if at least it's one form of "good" investment for "them", they pay for fuel with fiat money, even with a credit number in an account, so obviously unlike us they don't care about the coin/watt ratio, so why don't they pocket all those coins out htere? and if it's not the US, then why isn't any other sizeable government flicking one or two or three main frames to farm the whole lot. I mean the story about prisoners in china mining coins is not that strong, you just leave the pc on running, you don't need a person physically doing the work?
Of course, both the U.S. government and other governments are free to mine bitcoins if they want (and can justify the expense to their taxpayers).
Anyone who contributes their computing power to the network will be rewarded; Bitcoin doesn't discriminate.
Q2: If a currency is one day to become an alternative currency, then shouldn't there be at least so many coins out there as there are people? and at least say 100 coins per person so you can buy and buy, not buy and sell and always remain coinless? what is the point in investing in a currency that has 20 million or 100 million coins only? there will be people left out who will need to create their own currency? isn't it better to have a currency that has say 500-1000 billion coins and that'd become truly worldwide?
Each bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places, providing a total of 2 quadrillion currency units (called "satoshis", in honour of Satoshi Nakamoto), enough for everyone on Earth to own about a quarter of a million satoshis each.
Q3: Why would anyone exchane BTC/LTC/xC... for fiat currency on any exchnage. Isn't the true purpose behind the system to create an alternative currency? If somone is in it to pay so much for watts and then get more fiat then they put for the BTCs they generate, then isn't the fiat their ultimate goal in this case? wouldn't the day come where one day they will say oh my God what did we do, we had useful non fiat coins and we exchanged them for fiat that have become worthless? Having an exchange is a good way for the system to breath, allowing people to quit, but it seems to have become a goal, and people buying $$$$$ machines to make $$$$$, not to make a reserve wealth for an alternative currency?
The goal of exchanges is the same as the goal of money itself: to allow people to trade things they
have for things they
want. When someone sells their coins for fiat, who do think is
buying them? Obviously, it's someone else who wants to buy coins for fiat. And that's good, because how else would someone who has only fiat (which, incidentally, is most of the population of the world) acquire their first bitcoins?
Q4: What prevents someone who knows how to write software from creating a mass online job on BOINC or other mass computing farm, label the job as "research to help the poor around the world" or something, and actually what they'll be doing is distributing work and getting the coins back themselves?
The same thing that stops people from writing software to do
anything and tricking other people into running it: not much. That's why malware is such a major problem in the world today.
Q5: One day when the fiat ends people will deliver goods and services in return for coins. This sounds good. What does not sound good is the following: i am running my pc thus burning energy and damaging the environment, and I am getting virtually rich doing it. I am not doing any physical work. Seems the ultimate nerdy way to do nothing and get rich? just leave a machine on? Why isn't earning bitcoins NOW happeneing in a "deserved" way?
Mining
does do real work. Not just
real work, but
necessary work. It is the process of validating the record of all Bitcoin transactions, in such a way as to make fraudulent modification of this record next to impossible. If you were wondering what stops people from simply "copying" a bitcoin and spending it in more than one place (the so-called "double-spending problem"), this is it.
Q6: If someone forges a fiat currency, the government will lock them in jail for the rest of their lives. This is one way to proctect the sheep. Don't tell me there will NOT come the day when they discovered some 14 yo geek who has reverse hacked the thing or did this and that, or they created a quantum machine that can decrypt this SHA256 algorithm in a jiffy, what happens to all the energy you spent then?
SHA256 is used for more than just Bitcoin. It is used in many, many other cryptographic applications including electronic banking, military intelligence, digital forensics, etc. If it were ever "cracked", we're not the only people who'll be in a world of shit. In any case, it's most unlikely to happen overnight. What's far more likely to happen is "weaknesses" will be discovered in the algorithm, which might theoretically lead to it being eventually cracked, say, several years afterwards. In that case, there'll be plenty of time to switch to a new algorithm.
Put it in a totally different way, can you go to a Police and say "someone stole my bitcoins" and that will be an actual offence they can take action on?
Guess you haven't been reading
the news lately.
