https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583696870704152576 1/I follow Bitcoin like some people follow Nascar crashes. Some quick thoughts in tweetstorm format:
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583697092306014208 2/ It is an open secret in the Bitcoin community that merchants who adopt it see virtually no meaningful transaction volume.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583697371378257920 3/ Western Union spends roughly 1/2 of revenue on local offices by both ends of the transactions. Bitcoin remittances don't solve this.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583697585719746560 4/ Bitcoin presently costs on the order of $6.5k per megabyte of data added to the block chain.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583697812438691841 5/ The entire market cap of Bitcoin as of 4/1/2015 is a fee paid to someone for work already done between 2009 and 4/1/2015.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583698553614143488 6/ Most advantages of Bitcoin which matter are captured by, and improved upon by, a LAMP app which simply holds account balances.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583699554563784704 7/ Bitcoin's Internet cheering squad is a spontaneously organized boiler room. This is Bitcoin's #1 engineering and marketing achievement.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583699782624911361 8/ The cheering squad improves upon techniques used to make Ross Perot and Rand Paul seem like serious contenders for the US presidency.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583700634764910592 9/ Bitcoin is not a protocol in any meaningful sense of word. It is a single C++ codebase that you have to be bug-for-bug compatible with.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583701008754147329 10/ Bitcoin's disaster recovery plan is a) get a cabal of people together in IRC, b) shut down the entire payment network, c) sort things.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583701441866371073 11/ No, seriously, the decentralized nobody-needs-to-trust-anybody payments network was shut down by an IRC channel's consensus for 8 hrs.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583702513469104128 12/ Time between Bitcoin blocks is not guaranteed (follows a Poisson distribution). Sometimes all pending transactions just stop for a while
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583702865098604544 13/ The media following Bitcoin, both enthusiast press and tech rags, are so incompetent at their jobs that it beggars belief.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583703396231716864 14/ One example of many: a single phone call or letter in Japanese would have sufficed to verify that Mt. Gox was insolvent in summer 2013.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583706966553276417 15/ A good portion of geek enthusiasm for Bitcoins comes from the fact that it is programmable money. But: Money is also programmable money.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583707625210060800 16/ This concludes my mini-rant on Bitcoin. I have a longer, more technical rant but will do it some other time.
It would have been good to put a disclaimer in there that the rant applies only to the currency aspect of Bitcoin, and not the Bitcoin Protocol.