This brings us to another lesson that Bitcoin has taught us. Money is like any other good in society in that it can be produced and managed entirely by the free market. This is the reverse of what scholarly opinion has said for more than 100 years.
What Bitcoin introduces is a money supply with that question of trust removed, with enforcement by mathematical means. This only became possible recently of course, with the advent of enormous computational processing power and interconnectivity. The latter part of adoption by merchants seems to have very recently reached critical mass by way of networking effects. So Bitcoin could indeed be on the rise to become the world's monetary system.
At this point, Bitcoin's biggest danger is not obscurity and oblivion or a free market crash, it's regulation or illegalization from governments that may be hostile to the existence and usage of a currency system they don't and can't control. The US and EU governments are the entities with possible power to kill Bitcoin, because they possess legalized force outside of the Bitcoin protocol and ecosystem.
Except that there is no formal definition of the security for Bitcoin, so there is no meaningful "enforcement." Formal definitions of security for digital cash systems cannot be applied to Bitcoin because of the lack of a central authority. The security of Bitcoin is extremely vague, based on hand-waving arguments about computational power that are extremely difficult to analyze.
Even if somehow we overlook that lack of rigor, "enforcement" is not accurate. There is a known, polynomial time, practical attack that allows Bitcoin money to be double-spent. That does not sound like "enforcement by mathematical means" to me, at least not if the "mathematics" you are referring to are cryptography, game theory, or related fields (and I am not sure what other mathematics would even be used to enforce rules).
Also, this is a ridiculous argument because all fist currencies are being manipulated now to avoid a default-inspired crash. Your cash is rotting in your pocket, and your investments aren't making back inflation let alone a profit.
1. That is not well-defined. What does double-spending even mean for Bitcoin? Previous security definitions for digital cash define double spending in terms of a central bank that issues the money.
2. Even with the vague idea of what double-spending means for Bitcoin, your statement is false under the definition of "hard" that cryptographers typically use. There is a known polynomial-time algorithm for double spending Bitcoin that was described in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. That attack is practical and there are already concerns about one "mining pool" that has almost enough computational power to pull it off (and if they are willing to accept a small probability of failure, they already have that much power).
You're essentially a troll. What you say is true but double spending a few coins (your maximum return is 2x) would take hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of luck. Duplicating paper money requires an inkjet printer with good registration and the common sense to separate the eruion constellations into separate layers. It's not rocket surgery, and once the source file is made it can be replicated at any copy shop. Its vanishingly unlikely you haven't accepted a counterfeit bill, and its vanishingly unlikely a bitcoin could be double-spent beyond seven blocks.
Give it up. Bitcoins may not be a sound investment but they're far more secure than cash for both parties.
The same can be said of every fiat currency : they're useless unless you can get real stuff (or services) for it at the end of the day.
Even if a business only dealt in Bitcoin money it would still need to exchange at least some of its earnings for fiat currency if it had any intention of following the law. That is why Bitcoin exchanges matter: even if a business did transactions with both Bitcoin and fiat currency, there would be times when that business did not have enough fiat currency and would have to exchange its Bitcoin money to survive. There is a reason that everyone talks about the value of Bitcoin relative to other currencies, and it is that people must use other currencies to conduct some of their business.
On the other hand, fiat currencies do not require foreign exchange to be valuable. It was very difficult to convert the Soviet Ruble to foreign currencies, but in the USSR the Soviet Ruble was money and had value.