In a year or so you'll be buying cryptocurrency, especially when the Yield Curve starts dropping and we enter another downturn in the Market.
There is a generation of kids who will only know electronic gold aka cryptocurrency.
See: https://www.mixcloud.com/TheTimFerrissShow/244-the-quiet-mas...
Perhaps. Equally possible is that we're somewhere on the peak portion of the usual technology hype cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle). The part dominated by rife speculation of potential applications of the technology and overly optimistic estimations of it's benefits. That does sound a lot like the current crypto currency hubbub. Especially since as mentioned in the OP article, actual killer applications of crypto currency have yet to appear.
So when speculation and the confidence game surround it subsides, we'll enter the trough of disillusion, where if anything the technology will be undervalued for a time. Finally if practical uses emerge, the curve ticks up and levels off as a true reflection of the reality of the situation. We are certainly not there yet.
"Miss the boat" is a dead giveaway that we're in the hype phase. It's a simple appeal to the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) which often drives investors into a bubble at it's peak. The trope of 'this time it's different' may prove right once in a blue moon, but the burden of proof definitely sits with the party making the claim.
Specific to crypto currency as a technology, there are some very real reasons to be cautious at this time. All value right now is based on the sole foundation of perceived future value. This mirrors housing market bubbles etc. Without significant real-world utility emerging, the value of bitcoins will disappear once everyone figures out that selling them to each other is not actually increasing their value.
Bitcoin is not the singleton of crypto currency, merely the first implementation to gain a significant following. This is very different to nation-based currencies and even for them, a significant portion of their value rests on the backing provided to them by their respective nation's prosperity and stability. Accordingly, expect unbacked crypto currency to be extremely unstable, over the long term.
if all you want to do is crash bitcoin then you'd have achieved your goal (albeit at a huge expense), but it's certainly not a good way of making money.
because blocks contains transactions, not balances, and transactions are validated individually (simplified: bitcoins are sent to public keys, and to spend those coins, you need to sign "send coins to public key x" with your private key), thus ensuring that if you took control right now, you can't make arbitrary transactions, and you're stuck with the current transaction state.
* mine arbitrary amounts of money, since how much you can get from each block is enforced by every node in the network
* generate arbitrary transactions (ie. stealing people's money) since those transactions would need to be signed by those peoples' private keys (which you don't have), and the validity of those signatures are checked by every node in the network.
* rewrite history (ie. saying a transaction from a year ago never happened), since your block builds on top of those blocks, and forcibly putting transactions in your block that contradict the history contained in those blocks would cause other clients to reject your block. you could get around this by building your block on top of a block that was around before that transaction occurred, but then you will be met by the "catching up" problem, since the "tip" of the chain is determined by the sum of the proof of work in all of its blocks. your chain of 7 years + 1 block would have much less proof of work than the legitimate chain of 8 years. by proof of work i'm referring to the same mechanism that controls the difficulty in mining blocks.
what you could do:
* collect the 12.5 BTC/block mining reward (but you can get this without being evil)
* block other people's transactions from being processed, essentially freezing other peoples' balances at the point when the fork started (doesn't get you any money though)
* doubling your income as a miner by not building on top of other miners' blocks, allowing you to capture all the block rewards instead of only 51%. (the ensuing panic and market crash would most likely make this move not profitable)
I think that if there was any mistake of QE, the mistake was that it didn't go far enough. Looking back, the recession ended up being deeper and longer than initially expected, and worries over inflation ended up not proving true. With the benefit of this hindsight, it seems clear to me that more QE would have helped the country.
In contrast, bitcoin exchanges have a high rate of getting hacked and losing all customers money. There is no protections against insider trading... and mining is controlled by a couple guys in China, not a body that we have democratic control over. How is that better than the current system?