Government has no place in Bitcoin, and people would stop using it if they did decide to snoop around and change things. The idea of a backdoor in encryption is pretty stupid, everyone pretty much agrees with that by now. I'd be suspicious of any new encryption algorithms that come out from past now.

I don't we would be here if we didn't support Bitcoin. I believe that Bitcoin will never replace FIAT, but will rather find itself as a way to transfer funds anonymously when it simply isn't safe to do it otherwise, whether for good or for evil, much as it is now. Overall, I think Bitcoin will still be around 50+ years from now because simply put, there is no other cryptocurrency as stable and as big as Bitcoin-there's just no substitute, no matter how small its job is.

We shouldn't have to pay fees to send Bitcoins, part of the whole idea of Bitcoin is avoiding fees like those placed on FIAT bank accounts. Either way, something is building in Bitcoin as a whole, and things are going to get very interesting very fast in the near future... 

Bitcoin has found its niche for anonymous online payments, and will never truly get rid of FIAT banks. As for its own, Bitcoin has banks itself (exchanges). Banks are a necessary part of any economic system, whether you like it or not, there will always be a need.

There's no form of currency that would work in every situation. TBH food and water would probably be the most valuable commodities if everything really went down, and when there isn't an emergency/societal meltdown it isn't really that useful as a currency as carrying tons of water and food all day long is simply inefficient. Every "currency" has its niche.

The transaction confirmation times are pretty brutal. Pretty much casual use of Bitcoin (like buying a hotdog on the street) is very hard to do because of this. Sure, it might be a low value item, but people will exploit anything they can. The only time I think people would buy something with Bitcoin that wouldn't be any less convenient than FIAT is big value items like cars (where there would be tons of paperwork to do anyway) and online shopping, and of course the block chain issue isn't helping any of this.

Russia's FIAT is extremely unstable. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more "serious" users because of this, but I still think the majority of people are in the US and China.

But 1.0 doesn't have to mean the end of the end. It could simply represent a fairly stable release with the majority of longstanding issues fixed-i.e. the original goals of core in a stable platform, not that we're anywhere close anyway. If people never released a 1.0 until software was perfect, nothing would ever leave beta. There's always room to improve, and besides, I think people are too hung up over the number anyway.

It's great that they're finally accepting it as a true currency, but I fear that it will cause the kind of government control that Bitcoin hoped to avoid in the first place. At least it would be like herding cats if they ever do try to pull a quick one...

Someone cooked the books here. Giving back those Bitcoins is giving away free money. Perhaps the hackers thought they couldn't keep the Bitcoins for a large amount of time (about to get caught) and wanted to dump them while they could.

We don't need random eBay sellers accepting Bitcoin since usually this is instantly converted to FIAT, lowering Bitcoin's value and increasing volatility, we need people getting paid in Bitcoin so that sellers don't ditch it as soon as they get it.

Yeah, Electrum is pretty much the way to go for something lie this. Of course, if you need more security (storing your life savings :/) I would go for a different client.

Altcoins are just distractions from Bitcoin. They usually have no real value except as a mining pump and dump profit. What was the last time anyone had a serious thought about Dogecoins being a world-wide accepted currency?

Bitcoin is still too unstable to hold any large value for a high period of time. Obviously, this will change over time as more people use it. For now FIAT is still more reliable.

If people want something centralized, they'd be using FIAT. A centralized crypto currency would destroy the entire purpose of itself.

I'm having issues adding the GPU mining when running scrypt. I use the --scrypt argument, and the -S opencl:auto argument, and it runs, but only at around 16 khs, I think it's CPU mining? I have a radeon 270x with the most recent AMD SDK installed, but it's still not working.   I know I'm doing something wrong, but what?