Easy enough to rob someone for this amount of money too. As Eric Schmidt said (in the context of a hostile government, but it works here too): no passcode in the world is going to protect you from a man holding a gun to your head and demanding said passcode.

If you have to do that, it doesn't seem particularly advantageous over existing methods. You're meeting in person, exchanging cash illicitly, etc. If someone is willing to do that, why not just buy USD in a foreign bank account directly? (That's my understanding of the current system; people with clean histories open accounts with varying amounts of money in USD / EUR / JPY jurisdictions, then transfer control of those accounts to someone else, for a small profit margin, who then transfers them again, in exchange for cash at a significant margin, in, say, China.)

Either way, someone ends up with cash CNY and the other person ends up with electronic USD or EUR or whatever.

The immediate limiting factor is the vulnerability of any in-person transaction to traditional law enforcement mechanisms, and the eventual limiting factor is that the exchange rate is going to be impacted by the demand for cash CNY. Eventually nobody is going to want to sell you USD (or whatever) for your cash-in-a-bag CNY, or will only do it at exorbitant rates.

Yet you do realize that Bitpay just converts BTC to USD, correct?

It's the equivalent of you selling your BTC holdings at market rate and buying the car with USD.

Look into DASH, it has a fundamentally different architecture than bitcoin. The biggest pros are instantSend, privateSend, and the DAO (A governance system).

In addition to the other response, another example is ethereum's ability to offer smart contracts, which is not possible with bitcoin. Transaction rate limits and power consumption also are more efficiently handled.

They're different, which is why I used the term arguable--there's no clear reason afaik that bitcoin should be so valued relative to others, but I could be wrong.

The vast majority of novice speculators are using Coinbase. They at least attempt to maintain the appearance of compliance; but I suspect a large market run would wipe them out of USD fairly quickly.

The fact that “experienced” Bitcoin speculators are getting nervous is a sign the bubble is about to pop. Tether volumes are hockey-sticking up as a result. There has been enough technical analysis to show that USDT volume drives BTC price and not the other way around. USDT volume is hockey-sticking over the last few weeks. Feels like a Ponzi scheme and the whales are cashing out.