Bitcoin has everything it needs to become a major speculative bubble

What does that even mean?

Also, the US government doesn't really have anything to do with the USD; the USD is managed solely by the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve is not a branch of the US government (it's a privately held bank; look it up).

"it's not nothing"

It's worse than nothing. The Federal Reserve can and does change the value of the dollar at will (it's called inflation). That's why you can buy a loaf of bread with your 5 bucks now, but in 10 years your 5 bucks probably won't even buy a candy bar.

Contrast that with gold. In 1913 (the year the Federal Reserve was created), you could buy a house with 100 ounces of gold. 100 1913 dollars is worth roughly 2 2013 dollars, but 100 1913 ounces of gold is worth exactly 100 2013 ounces of gold, and you can still buy a house with it (100 ounces of gold is $156,740 USD; no, this won't buy you a house in New York, but it will in most other parts of the country). That's what it means for a currency to be backed by something of value. Value doesn't change.

Things change.

I wonder how "running" cyprus is now :P

I'd say the fundamentals could be found looking in the weaknesses in government/central bank fiat and the controls put in place on how freely people can obtain and receive goods/services.

But yeah, this is a bubble, but if you look at the fundamentals that governments/central banks are running on now, it just takes one country with a overly bloated private banking sector and dieselboom to apply his templates… :P

How exactly is it doing that?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50817.640

Like I said, bitcoin is more of a toy than a currency. If I want to play around with fake money, I'll join a virtual stock exchange.

Sorry but human history is full of cycles and mistakes repeated over and over.

Have you ever heard "Humans are the only animals that stumble on the same rock twice" ?

See every bubble ever.

Haha, that's funny. See tulips, housing, Iraqi Dinar, CO Silver industry crash, gold in the 80s, the list goes on.

That is quite possibly one of the stupidest statements I've ever read on HN, let alone the wider internet. We don't study history because we seriously think we can avoid making the same mistakes, really. We study history because we need to know what other people are going to get us entangled in because "this time, it's different".