I think Bitcoin is useful as an experiment in economics and monetary systems. But the thinking is far from baked and opportunists are jumping on this so quickl

I think Bitcoin is useful as an experiment in economics and monetary systems. But the thinking is far from baked and opportunists are jumping on this so quickly that a lot of money is going to be lost, .com-style. Maybe not with Bitcoin, but perhaps with its successor. And a lot more money than the .com bust, because now we're not dealing with just "new economy" utopias, we're dealing with 100+ year ideological disagreements. Just looking at the comments here, most people seem to have received their economic eduction from political rants and newspaper editorial pages rather than reading (and understanding) a few classics (Keynes, Marx, Minsky, Hayek, Schumpeter, or even Polanyi and Drucker). This is not to say the profession of economics is noble or even has any real use to the modern world currently, given its problems. But we do have an economic system, and some people do seem to have a better empirical understanding of it than others. And I'm not seeing a lot of empiricism here - lots of emotion, angst, rebelliousness, armchair theorizing, and hope. That's a good way to start something, but it's not a great way for it to finish the way you want. Ask the Marxists.