Bitcoin hate... I don't understand it... ?

[BlueStreak]

86. The systemic bias (by design) was hyper-inflation

I think it is fair to assume that a well-performing system would attract more users and increasing demand against fixed supply will drive the price up. That's what the system was designed to do. It was a Ponzi scheme with the inventor starting by giving himself 5% of the currency -- a million coins.

With a calamity on the scale of MtGox, demand can crater and the price goes down. I completely agree with what you are saying. My only point is that the design was as a Ponzi scheme, for the value to just keep going up. And the thing this system had over Ponzi is that there need not have been a day of reckoning. With a traditional Ponzi scheme, you have to keep selling to new suckers oin order to pay off earlier suckers. In the Bitcoin Ponzi scheme you don't have to pay off the earlier suckers. They get paid automatically because the bitcoin value keeps increasing. As long as it is seen a s a viable currency, there is no day of reckoning. And even if demand were to drop, the Ponzi operator doesn't have to do a reckoning. The coin holders simply lose part of their value. So it is actually a lot better than most Ponzi schemes.

What is amazing is that if not for the corruption of the Mt Gox people, this might just have worked and the inventor very well could have ended up with $20 billion, $40 billion or more. Hopefully the inherently criminal nature of this system has been exposed now and it will fade into oblivion.

Here's an article that talks about some of the practicalities when honest merchants deal in this stuff.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2014/02/24/tax-trouble-may-burst-the-bitcoin-bubble-for-merchants/