One feature that cannot be incorporated into Bitcoin is the brand new blockchain (i.e. the "radical fork" that starts with a new genesis block).  Also, it would be politically impossible to change the maximum number of Bitcoins (and hence a change in the block reward schedule).

Can we use simple numbers instead?

Didn't we all had to?

Do you mean 'sign' as in algebra, traffic, advertising, astrology, or semiotics?

I post on this thread, isn't that a sure sign?

You mean, why didn't I answer the recursive question?

Oops, was I mistaken?

Electronics solder melts around 185 C (365 F), correct?

If it is true, as Naguib Mahfouz once wrote, that one can tell a clever man by his answers, but a wise man by his questions, what are we to think of a thread that never gave good answers, and has apparently run out of questions?

They may know that you just sold your beach home and got paid in bitcoin.  They may have installed a spy program in you laptop and silently watched as you checked your balance and updated your cold wallet.  They will evaluate your car and house, and guess how much savings you may have.  Anyway, if their their idea of the size of your hoard is too low, lucky of you, but if it is too high, it is you who will be in real trouble.

XKCD is a helluva "meme generator".    But in reality the "5$ wrench attack" is usually more complicated than what the phrase suggests.

Armed robbers usually have some idea (right or wrong) about how much money you are worth. It can be as basic as "that guy must be loaded" based on your clothes and car; or a detailed profile of your worth and habits, from "casing" your home for several days, talking to talkative friends and service people, investigating your business, etc.

So, basically,  robbers will not want your password in order to check how much is the balance on your Trezor.  They will demand some satisfactory amount of money (or bitcoins, if they believe you have them), and expect you to do whatever you need to deliver it.

You may try to convince them that you have no way of providing the amount that they want, but that is risky: if they are forced to leave without the expected loot, they may kill you, out of anger, or to send a message to other future victims.  If you have family, they will probably use them as hostages and threaten to kill them.  On the other hand, "professional" robbers will rarely kill if they get what they expected.  If you do have enough money to make them happy, you will find that it is better to give it up than to risk the alternative.  Money can be recovered or earned again; your life, and that of your dear ones, cannot.

Robbers know that most people keep most of their dollars in the bank; so, normally, they will neither expect nor demand cash.  (Although they may take you to an ATM and force you to withdraw as much as possible.  And, if you do keep lots of cash at home, they may well know about it.)   But "bitcoin-enabled" robbers, if they know that you keep all your fortune in bitcoins, will probably assume that you can transfer all your coins from home, without contacting anyone else;  so they will probably demand all that they think you own.

(I can speak with some authority on this: although I have never been robbed (knock wood), several of my friends and relatives have been, some more than once.  And the student frat next to my home was robbed a couple of months ago.  Robbers usually came gangs of three or more, often in daytime, with handguns or machine guns.  Fortunately no one was harmed, and the robbers were content with carriable goods, such as laptops and TVs.  They did not expect to find large amounts cash -- except once, when  the gang had just watched the victim withdraw several thousand in cash at the bank.  But they took any guns that the victims had at home, including the entire collection of one victim.)

That is why a "business plan" is needed.  Obviously, the purchase power of bitcoin cannot keep growing 1000% per year forever.   When it stabilizes, will bitcoins appreciate more than stocks, or less than stocks? If more, no one will exchange their bitcoins for stock (so how would new companies start, and where will all the holders' revenue come from)?  If it starts growing less than stocks, then people will want to exchange their bitcoin hoards for stocks, and price will drop, maybe 90% or more, untill all the 21 million coins are in circulation.  Will this be the case, or will bitcoin appreciate just as much as bonds and stocks? The "business plan" would have to pick one aleternative and show that it is consistent with teh rest of the model.

Depending on the date of the "endgame" and the guessed price of bitcoin then, mining may not be enough to sustain the network, so the transaction fees will be mandatory.  The "business plan"  would have to guess the transaction volume, pick a percentage for the fees, and specify the difficulty level that matches that.  (Depending on the fee structure, paying a pizza with bitcoin may or may not make sense.)

One complication is that there may be banks and/or credit card companies offering payment services in bitcoin, possibly with smaller fees (being centralized, their porcessing costs would be much smaller than bitcoin's) and/or other advantages (like lending, cancellation, insurance, etc.)  But payments made through them will normally be accounted in their internal ledgers, not in their blockchain (like, as of now, most dollar payments made through banks do not involve dollar bills).  Those intrabank payments will not pay bitcoin transaction fees.  So, in order to establish the bitcoin demand and fees, the business plan would have to identify the fraction of payments that will be made through the blockchain, and may have to pay higher fees than bank transfers.

I know that all these issues have been extensively discussed, but I have only seen them addressed one at a time, and I wonder whether the "solutions" that have been presented for them in isolation are compatible with each other.  (For example, I recall one famous advocate claiming that people would pay coffee and groceries with a blockchain app on their cellphones, while another claimed that bitcoin would be used only for expensive items like cars or real estate, another wrote that it would be used only for transactions that need to be hidden, and yet another that it would be used only for inter-bank settlements...)

Isn't that what day traders are supposed to do?

OKCoin/International started 17 days ago, but is still struggling.  Volume in the last 24 h was only 220 BTC (not kBTC).  IIRC, that is 1/2 of their daily volume just after opening.

No idea how BitVC, the "international" branch of Huobi, is doing.

Hm, I wonder if you have seen the BFL CEO's CV?  If you haven't, maybe your perspective will change again somewhat... 

Not wanting to imply that there are any scammers in the bitcoin community, but...

If you had the misfortune of losing money to a scammer, be warned that you will never get your money back by arguing with him.  It doesn't matter whether you are polite, insistent, threatening, furious, logical, plaintive, sarcastic, whatever.  It won't help to tell him that you need your money back because your only child is dying of cancer and you are being evicted and you have already sold a kidney to pay for food.

Words are his weapon of choice, the katana that he handles with skill.  Making his victims waste time with lies and empty promises, until they get tired and give up, is not only his job but a source of professional pride.  He has convinced himself that you deserve to lose your money, if nothing else "because you are a sucker".  He is fully immunized against your tales of distress, which he assumes are false and therefore despises you even more "for being a liar".

The most you can get by arguing with a scammer is the occasional pithy satisfaction of catching him in contradiction -- which will make no difference, as he will not be in the least bothered by it.

(Apologies if I am repeatng myself.  I have been folowing also the threads about Neo&Bee, Butterfly Labs, Intersango, Cryptorush, Bitfunder, and a few others, and they are so similar in their general tone that I often get confused about which is which.)

(By the way, when @Gleb_Gamow posted that walmart video, at first I thought that it was totally irrelevant to this therad; but now I see that it was very relevant, and substantially changes my perspective of the affair. Unfortunately I cannot explaing why and how; if you cannot see it by yourselves, well, perhaps I am allucinating, so forget it.)

Sorry, was this the "substantive point"?
I read that as "who cares for the long-term future, I hope to make a good profit if I sell at the right time."  Apologies, if that is not what you meant.

As for politics, I was only responding to your statement about "people being worth the label human".  I did not stuck teh tongue at you, but at an ideology that I find quite sick.
 

People still use dollar bills all the time for their convenience, not bothered by the fact that dollar bills lose 1% (or whatever) per year of purchase power.   People who want to store value do not save dollar bills, they buy stocks, Treasury bonds, real estate, etc..  Why would it not be the same with Bitcoin vs. Garbagecoin?

Only problem is that stocks pay dividends, bonds pay uinterest, but bitcoin is worth anything only if people will want to buy it for use as currency...

That is what a "business plan"  would have to do: describe an economic scenario for bitcoin such that individuals (including ordinary consumers as well as miners, entrepreneurs, big investors, etc.), acting on their self-interest, would tend to maintain that scenario, or at least would not destroy it right away.

"Aut bitcoin, aut nihil." And then people claim that bitcoin is not a religion... 

I have no doubt that payment systems will evolve.  I find it very likely that the current fees will drop dramatically, that something like the cyptocoin idea of offline key/address generation will replace centrally stored passwords, and so on. 

What I fid very unlikely is that the bitcoin protocol will become widely used before  better alternatives come along.  Even if the bitcoin protocol were to prevail, nothing ensures that it would preserve the current blockchain.  (If the rest of mankind will have a choice, they will not agree to that.) Miners will decide what they will do with their equipment, and I am not devious enough to guess what they could do to maximize their revenue.

Human beings, even very good human beings, can survive and be human under very nasty governments.  You should be prepared to do so, since you will have to live under one, sooner or later, no matter where you are.

People giving up on traditional politics and democracy, in the silly hope that a global totalitarian 'deus ex machina' will allow them to ignore governments and build a "free" society independent from them, will only make such nasty governments more likely to rise.   

Indeed, I keep coming back to that breakout because it is pretty much the only major event since last October for which I do not know of a cause that would justify the traders's sudden change of mood. (There was one other surge this year, Mar/03 IIRC, I never found a convincing explanantion for.)

I could perhaps believe that technical analysis can predict gradual changes, or rallies and crashes that start out gradually and then accelerate (like the mini-crash earlier today, at 00:15 UTC).  ButI find it hard to believe  that thousands of traders across the globe would suddenly change their minds and start a rally like on May 20.  I know that there is strong feedback among traders, but it should take some time for them all to "syntonyze" on the new outlook.  I still think that an unknown external cause is more lilkely than a colective epiphany...

Moreover, between the buying spurts after May 20, there were usually periods of gradual downtrend, as if most traders were still "unconverted"  to the new price.  Only after June 4 or so there seems to be a "new consensus" arooun 650$ -- which collapsed  on Jun/10--12.