Just a few points here, although most of your comment is valid. > Well, secure if you don't count the successful double-spend attack which necessitated a holy-

Just a few points here, although most of your comment is valid. > Well, secure if you don't count the successful double-spend attack which necessitated a holy-shit-drop-everything-and-downgrade response by several mining pool operators You're getting your history wrong. There was a problem with older satoshi clients that caused a fork in the block chain. The fork was serious enough that all miners with newer clients were asked to temporarily downgrade. There was also somebody who took advantage of that fork to create a double-spend. So, 1) The double spend was caused by the holy-shit moment, not the other way around. 2) There is no proof anybody lost money. Most big merchants stopped processing transactions during the fork, who knows if the transactions on the losing chain were accepted. > designed intent of bitcoin is to fan attacker-chosen executable instructions to every node on the network This is just fear-mongering. The intent is to create a medium of exchange between untrusted parties. There is a scripting system that used to be run by clients when checking whether a transaction output could be spent. That system has a) never been able to do much of anything except manipulate numbers and b) been disabled for quite some time now.