New years has a psychological effect, so there might be high volatility.

I'll bet he's already invested.

First thing that it does when you run it is it zips ~/.bitcoinwallet and uploads it to h4xx0rz.ru

As you know, there are only countably many words in the english language - we don't even have enough words to name each real number in mathematics - so there is bound to be some overlap.  Any use of language is inherently political, pushing and pulling on the meanings of words.  Existing words come with strings attached, while new words have to be coined.  However, talking about language politics is irrelevant (except in order to dismiss it).  No matter what words somebody else chooses to use, you can always choose words that properly convey your meaning to them.

There are 7 billion people on the planet.  Assuming each person gets their own bitcoin wallet, getting everybody onto the system will take 7 billion transactions / 10 transactions per second = 22 years.  Additionally, the human birth rate is about 10 per second, and so bitcoin TPS would have to be at least that great to even keep up.

Comparing TPS with birth rate allows you to estimate how many transactions you can make in your lifetime.  If bitcoin offers 20 TPS and birth rate is 10 per second, then basically you can form a wallet and then make one transaction in your lifetime.  Thus, I think TPS would have to be far greater than the birth rate in order for bitcoin to work as a global currency.

So this topic is to ask the question, given proper application of lightning networks etc, how many TPS do you think would be needed to support a planet of 7 billion people?

If you're paranoid about losing your bitcoins to a trojan, you can always keep your wallet saved under a different user and remove all file permissions.

A currency for the planet earth has to be robust against failure.  Bitcoin happens to depend on certain specific cryptographic and hashing algorithms.  These are believed to be secure today, but there is a chance that a hack is found or a rainbow table is developed.

If someone hacks the hashing algorithm and can produce blocks extremely rapidly, they could take control of the blockchain, at least until either their hack became widely known or all the miners switched to a different hashing algorithm.  Far worse, if someone hacked the public key algorithm, it would be a race against time to move your bitcoins to another currency or have them stolen.

Will this be a problem for bitcoin?  I don't think so...  Don't use bitcoin for your retirement fund.

One could imagine a cryptocurrency that uses multiple public key and hashing algorithms simultaneously, and has the ability to add new cryptographic algorithms if one is ever broken.  This would obviously be more secure than bitcoin, but slower and stuff.

Question: Is the probability that a cryptographic algorithm used by Bitcoin gets hacked greater or smaller than the probability that a friggin huge gold deposit is found, rendering gold worthless?