Bitcoin Is Not as Secure, Unregulated, or Lucrative as You Might Think

It disappears in Iraq. What, you think they're gonna burn it for warmth? Those bucks are coming back.

A simple example: there are some TCP/IP stacks where the urgent pointer indicates the last byte of urgent data, and some where it indicates the first byte after the last byte of urgent data. Obviously these aren't the same thing, and only one is correct according to the standard, but both kinds of stacks are (I think) still in use. We get around this by basically not using urgent data in our TCP streams.

BGP is a "trust" system where you just assume your peers tell the truth and action their routing changes accordingly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking#Public_incidents

DNS has no spoof protection and due to UDP can be used to DoS third parties by mislabelling your packets and requesting large records.

SMTP has no built in way to verify the sender actually works for the domain it claims to work for (see SPF and DKIM as potential workarounds).

Everything is being worked on and improved. But the broken stuff is still a large party of the internet today.

Maybe more than anything, people abuse what the Internet is for. Hospitals running their patient records over devices on the public Internet (that are almost certainly full of exploitable security holes on some port, which is probably an Internet "bug" in how easy it is to just barrage all the ports on a machine to find some exploitable application if they aren't proactive with managing the security).

One thing the Internet does show is that a system doesn't have to be perfect to be robust and incredibly useful. In fact, worse is often better in that way too. If IP were orders of magnitude more complex to deal with all its potential edge cases, it likely would not have been as successful.

That's a stretch. If it were not valuable monetarily, its price would be similar to other difficult-to-extract, heavy metals with a long list of unique properties, like Iridium or Rhenium, neither monetary, and both around $400 an ounce.

Which is much, much less common.

The fact is you don't know anymore than us if govs will shut down the endpoints with "real world", or if BTC will succeed to create its own ecosystem and reach the point where it don't need dollars anymore.

All we can do is argue and convince ourselves if BTC is a good bet or a disastrous bet. Something you obviously can't if you threat everyone insane.