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The author refuses to understand that currently cash transactions are entirely untraceable; and bank and card transactions can be traced only by the banks and governments. However Bitcoins are a public system that is based on the fact that everyone, everywhere has a complete list of all purchases by every single user. The users are hiding behind numbers of their wallets, but it's not rocket science to unravel this by starting somewhere and then mining the database (blockchain) of all current and past purchases and transfers. BTC is a wide open book for anyone who is willing to read it. BTC has no privacy, and it is not even supposed to provide one. The nearest analogy is that you can get a bank card with an alias on it, and spend it thinking that nobody in stores will know that "John Doe" is actually $your_real_name_here. Bitcoin is an interesting technology, but it is mired in problems that range from technical (it does not scale; purchases require up to 15 minutes to confirm) to social (who are the initial miners who secretly mined 1/4 of the BTC mass while nobody was aware of the BTC?) The BTC is a dead end. The idea of digital currency is not a dead end, but it needs to be rebuilt from scratch, using the lessons obtained from the BTC experiment. It must be put to trial in various countries, and the deficiencies fixed. Only then it can become usable. Until then... there is nothing wrong with the money that we have today. There is no urgency to fix it - unless, of course, like the secretive BTC creators, you want to profit from selling your own fiat currency to the world.

Everyone knows cash is more-or-less untraceable. Bitcoin combines pseudonymity with the convenience of digital transfer. You are right in your description of the total transparency of the blockchain, but identifying the real persons connected to each account will vary from simple to impossible depending on the care they take.

There are both good and bad reasons for such anonymity. Crime is an obvious reason, but on the flip side companies will not want to have all their transactions viewed by competitors. So anonymizing technologies and altcoins like Dash, Monero, Bitcoindark and many others are helping fill this niche.

As I mentioned, thousands of developers are building the bitcoin infrastructure. Calling it a dead end is as stupid as calling the Internet past its prime in 1995.

And yes, there are now hundreds of alternative cryptocurrencies in competition with bitcoin. All this competition will help make the winners better and every more highly optimized for every financial niche. What innovation is going on in the world of fiat by comparison? Shall I snigger at that question? ;-)

Complaining that early miners benefited because bitcoin has turned out to be a raging success is no different than complaining about Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or any other inventor or early adopter who took a risk and has reaped great reward. What are you, a Bernie Sanders plant here on Free Republic?

As matter of fact, there is a lot of innovation in fiat currencies. You might have noticed that the US merchants are switching (or have switched, they have a deadline in October) to the "Chip and Signature" method of authorizing cards. Some are experimenting with NFC payment methods. Going back, banks offered online access to everything and provided you with a number of one-time use card numbers. Going further back, online purchases became possible. It's quite a lot of innovation that happened within just last 20-25 years.

I cannot say much about all the alternative cryptocurrencies. If some are better, more power to them. However it is essential that a cryptocurrency that is selected for a major one in a country has to work at least as well as the existing systems. How long does it take today to authorize a card scan? A second or two at most. How long does it take to confirm a BTC purchase? Five to fifteen minutes. As you can see, BTC is simply not ready to become a viable payment instrument. By design, it never will be. I assert that the BTC is a good, interesting experiment that demonstrated something good and something bad. The blockchain was a significant invention - and it is also the Achilles' heel of the whole design. BTC is a heavyweight design with extremely high cost of each transaction. Compare to current banking systems - they are decentralized, they are scalable, and they have very low cost of transaction. The customer does not need a blockchain; he only needs his goods. The math of confirming the purchase is not his problem, it should stay between the merchant and the bank. It is too much to ask the whole planet to vote on my purchase of a cup of coffee.