Sorry, I am confused, what was the question again?

How could I tell that he/she/it is not?

I predict that by 2030 malnutrition will be a major public health problem among the patrons of all-senses-covered virtual restaurants.  

(Something like that was described in an old book by Stanislaw Lem, /The Futrological Congress/.  By the way, that is where the Wachowski stole the red pill / blue pill idea from.)

It was fun seeing him squirm and dodge while the interviewer tried (twice) to press him into endorsing bitcoin. 8-)

I predict that yours may be right or may be wrong.

On the internet, how can one know the biological classification of anyone else?

But if nothing that we build lasts forever, what is the difference between dream and reality?

Could it be because by any other name they would still be rolling papers?

And they have a maintenance fee too. Do they still have the six-month minimum holding period?

Ugh, why doesn't Coindesk just publish the tanscript of the interview, instead of paraphrasing what he said?

Bitcoin's price today is obviously determined by speculation.  The projections of it "going to the moon" assume that people will one day buy it in order to use it as payment medium.  Dividing the estimated volume of e-commerce by the number of bitcoins available in the market gives an astronomical  price.  But that demand -- "buy to pay" -- is still much smaller than "buy to hold" and "buy to daytrade".

And "buy to daytrade" is still mostly in China, where "buy to pay" cannot grow.  If the Chinese speculators get tired of bitcoin, the price will fall at least to 350 USD.  This is no theoretical prediction, it already got down there for a moment one day, when it seemed that the Chinese government was about to close the exchanges in China.  How far could it drop below that? 

This post by alleged former employee claims that
Who is James Gibson?

Volume at the new OKCoin/International exchange (BTC x USD) is growing slowly, but is still at 450 BTC/day (not kBTC!) while OKCoin/China has about 60'000 BTC/day now.

Volume at BitVC, Huobi's "international" exchange (BTC x CNY only, it seems), is still unknown since they apparently show only the combined volume Huobi+BitVC, about 24'000 BTC/day now.(I wonder whether they have a merged order book?)

Who owns HashTrade? 

Bitcoin mixers are just a money laundering service; if they are not traps set up by the police, they will be illegal in that scenario (governments set up official database of tainted coins).  Sending your coins to a bitcoin laundering service will flag you as a suspect, and  any tainted input in a transaction will make all outputs tainted too. 

With the current blockchain traffic volume, it would be easy to keep such a database updated in real time, and the extra time+cost of checking it would be small compared to the time+cost required  the bitcoin transaction itself.

The stated purpose of bitcoin was to provide a method of internet payment that was fast cheap easy safe etc.. Some people thought that it was also a safe way to hide illegal payments from governments, and loved it for that perceived quality.  Those people (and presumably most readers of this thread) are now realizing that it never was.

A tainted-bitcoins database would only kill that use of bitcoin for good.  Cashiers would surely comply and check that database if it was automatic, and/or if they could be penalized for failure to do so (if only by having their own coins listed, and hence made worthless). 

A very good point.  Even cash is not entirely fungible: if you accept money that you *know* comes from illegal activity, you can be considered accessory to that activity.

The government cannot require store cashiers to check some "tainted cash" database before accepting banknotes; that is why tainted cash does not keep its taint for long.  But the government could require such checks for bitcoin, since the cashier has to connect to the internet anyway in order to accept a bitcoin payment.  

Er, good question, does a mythical creature eat mythical food, or does it eat real food, but only mythically?

Would you stop bickering, and feed the unicorn?

Another worrisome aspect of the blockchain statistics is that the "effective fee" for bitcoin payments is about 4% -- since the mining community earns 4000 BTC/day to process transactions whose estimated output volume (minus changeback) is 100'000 BTC/day.  Since mining is still a substantially free market, the actual cost must be not much below that value. 

Currently users do not pay that 4% fee, because it is paid by all the long-term holders of bitcoins, that lose 4000*365/12'000'000 = 12%/year of their value because of mining inflation.  (And, of course, that loss is more than offset by the price increase due to speculative demand.)  But since that fee will some day become a real transaction fee paid by users, it seems to be a bit too high for a service that is still often touted as "free" or "much cheaper than bank transfers".

But it gets worse if that 100'000 BTC/day blockchain traffic volume is indeed partly "fake" (transactions with no change in ownership).  In the final future when the mining costs will be paid by the users, the fake transactions will disappear and the cost will be borne by the real ones only.  But if 30% (say) of the volume now is fake, the "effective fee" now is not 4% but 4000/(0.70 x 100'000) = 5.7%.  If 50% of the volume is fake, the fee is 8%, and if 90% is fake, it is 40%.  So what is the "effective fee" now, and what will it be in that final future?

Putting on my triple-layer aerodynamic tinfoil hat, I would suspect that the blockchain traffic is being inflated with fake volume by The Powers That Wanna Be, in order to keep that calculation at 4% -- and thus preserve the illusion that bitcon can be a competitive payment method in that distant future.

This graphs tucks the last 8 months in a tiny corner, with the previous 4.5 years taking almost all the space.  If that tiny corner were magnified, the match would not be as impressive, I am afraid.

The "TX per day" parameter does not follow the price since late May, and both it and the "new addresses per day" deviate a lot from price from December to February.  I don't know how these discrepancies could be explained, but they cast doubt on the model.

As I noted before, transactions and addresses are still free, therefore those blockchain statistics could be mainly due to "fake" transactions -- coins moving between address belonging to the same person.   Note that the daily number of transactions has been nearly constant since February, and the estimated BTC volume is quite constant since  January -- with no echo of the huge fluctuations in price in that interval.  I take these facts as evidebce that only a small part of those transactions represents transfer of bitcoins between different owners.  Note also that a single user could generate all the present volume (100,000 BTC/day) by  moving 700 BTC divided among 400 addresses of  his own to 400 new addresses, every 10 minutes or so.