[bilbobike]

I think they're very useful, if your a guy like Musk, who needs to move billions of USD, anonymously. You can't carry gold around, nor diamonds anymore with full body scanners. BTC is the only way to move massive wealth, ergo why NK is using it to buy WMD material's & know-how.

USD is backed by guns ( nukes ), what is BTC back's by? Large numbers, 10E77 (2E256), greater than the number of sub-atomic particles in the universe. You more likely to find a nickle lost in our galaxy, than to find a specific BTC private-key.

The problem with the question here, is nobody thinks like a rich guy, let's fall back to JP-Morgans famous "Only gold is money, all else is credit". I hate to admit it but BTC in most recent decade has largely vacuumed up all the paranoid money that would normally be in gold.

I don't even want to touch on the fact that SHA256 & ECDSA SECP256k1 are both NSA algos that are backbone of BTC. In my day the NSA didn't release an algo that they didnt' have a backdoor key.

IMHO BTC is a great way to move massive wealth, but only the rich can play this game. From a GUV point of view BTC has kept the paranoid money out of gold, let's remember the original Satoshi white-paper came out of IMF-NSA, in 1997.

I myself have played BTC since 2011, and have hacked it since then, as its always been more fun to hack Secp256k1 ( big prime numbers and such ) than thinking about 'money' of which I have no use.

The problem that I see is like Alfred H Proofrock in the famous TS-ELIOT 'women come&go speaking of Michelangelo', IMHO BTC requires a total classic knowledge of math, physics, computation, and economic history to 'get-it', and thus given that most are not masters of these four, they're not unlike the wisemen holding different parts of the elephant.

In summary BTC is a toy of rich men, and it will go away when the NSA-IMF decides open the backdoors of sha-256&secp256k1. Even then newer coins will come out using sha-512, and secp512k-n, and the game will continue, as the crypto-currency model has been proven, and road-tested.

My advice for little people is to diversify, say have a little of everything, some gold, some farm-land, some stock, some cash, and most important of all to hold a passport is 'good country' when the SHTF in the USA. Today, I think it much better to play ETH and/or ZEN, which have had better gains, and still are profitable to mine, which allows you to accumulate with privacy, as the coinbase (or any 'exchange') purhcase of crypto is just an IRS database. I would say like gold, 5% crypto, and as along as its a good crypto, it doesn't really matter. By good I mean backed by good-teams, which is why I like ETH and/or ZEN;

BTC is a barometer that's why my #1 hobby is cracking BTC ( factoring ECDSA primes using GPU farms ) its field-medal level math, that you will never get public recognition for solving.