What I hear in conversation when Bitcoin price is low: "You're still doing Bitcoin stuff? Didn't Bitcoin die last year?"

Text messages I get when Bitcoin is at an ATH: "Hey do you think now is a good time to buy Bitcoin? How much should I buy?"

Luck is an interesting concept.

Survivorship bias could account for the lot of "lucky idiots" who are almost certainly a very small minority of users. I would wager there are probably just as many cases of people who were close to obtaining this title yet due to a single decision lost significant amounts. For example, anyone trading 6 years ago who bought in at a peak and decided to sell everything on the dip to cut their losses, or the people who lost everything in one of the many defunct exchanges. You don't really hear about them because they don't exactly advertise the fact that they made a bad decision.

There is always a balance.

High fees and a long transaction backlog indicate demand for block space. Personally I prefer using Bitcoin as a payment method because the experience is much better than using any analogous method. The situation we are in is not surprising. Bitcoin is far superior to any other payment method.

It is perfect for exactly the type of transactions I use it for: finding the best deal on Earth for a server and being able to pay for it, even if the company is overseas, or hiring someone from another country to do translation work, investing in a project, donating to a charity. The list goes on. None of these things come even close to paying for coffee and if I am limited to using the legacy banking institution for my morning coffee and afternoon lunch that's fine with me. If I truly wanted to I could easily use petty cash for local day-to-day purchases by turning Bitcoins into cash via an ATM or local traders within a block from where I live or where I work.

I have had issues with paying legitimate overseas companies with my credit card due to automatic fraud protection and I have had issues with eBay and other similar services regarding chargebacks, payment disputes, and other high-friction painpoints that simply do not exist in the context of Bitcoin (as long as you are an honest merchant).

I suspect I'm not alone in this case -- others are figuring out how much better Bitcoin is than traditional means of transmitting value -- and it is reflected in the price, volume, and transaction backlog. Would it be better if it were fixed? Yeah, probably. Is it affecting anyone who cares about *why* Bitcoin is effective? Probably not in any significant way.

BTC is currently good at, maybe even the best in the world at, being a:

• Store of value
• High-value transfer mechanism (currently $500 or more makes sense given the fees)
• Third-party-free payment system. For example: PayPal might close my account if they don't like what I'm doing with my own money on their network. That won't happen if instead I pay using the Bitcoin network.

We are starting to see why altcoins exist. Imagine a situation where some blockchain apps were written in a protocol on top of OP_RETURN in Bitcoin instead of in a separate chain. Now imagine that app has more of a parasitic relationship with the blockchain than a symbiotic one due to the properties of the Bitcoin blockchain. Some alt chains exist because Bitcoin isn't the right place for those experiments. It's a bad engineering decision to hope the baseline protocol doesn't shift from under your feet if you build on top of a blockchain whose user base does not have a consensus in agreement with whether or not your app is healthy for the ecosystem. I think it is better for both systems to separate concerns rather than try to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I think this argument is akin to "a government could nuke its own population to maintain control". Sure, you can rule over a barren wasteland of radioactive decay, but that kind of defeats the purpose of running a government in the first place.

The internet has become such an integral part of life that any draconian control over it would be a step backwards for the society that lives under that regime. At that point they would probably be confiscating gold as well.

I voted for the $6,000 to $6,500   range which surprisingly is the least popular. I think by end-of-year Bitcoin will be above $8k, but this month is super bearish in my circles, rumblings of altcoins and other rumors erode confidence.

It's almost as if Satoshi knew that specialized hardware and data centers would be created to mine bitcoin, told everyone about it, and it wasn't at all a surprise to anyone that this happened.

Bitcoin is decentralized, moreso than any other currency, and right now is best used as a digital store of value. That's a good start. Using it as currency is also possible, but clearly we're going through some growing pains, as the current explosive influx of users and interest was unforeseen.

Okay, everything you said is correct (except for that image) but you're moving the goalposts here by re-defining what "money" means. It is true that gold and silver have intrinsic value but it's also true that collective delusion creates "money". In your opinion it would be more accurately called an IOU but most people call it money because money is usually defined as the most efficient way to trade things without bartering. You certainly can't pay for a hamburger with silver but you might be able to buy lunch with Bitcoin or another crypto-currency soon. I already pay for my servers using Bitcoin.

Maybe you're right and it would be better in a hypothetical universe if we used silver or gold as a transactional unit. How would online purchases work in that case? Bitcoin is the only way to trade value using a decentralized network.