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what you fail to understand is that with any currency, including bitcoin and the dollar, the value is what people have agreed it is worth. again, the US dollar, the one in your pocket, has zero value.
i understand what you are saying and you are making some fundamental errors with your understanding of currency. if the US dollar were to lose usefulness, such as it not being used as the currency of choice for purchasing and trading oil, there would be hell to pay. there WILL be hell to pay.
hacking the algorithm.... you clearly don't understand how it works. the algorithm is out there. you don't even have to hack it. it is applying the algorithm to the blockchain. in order to hack the blockchain, you'd have to hack it twice in ten minutes. possibly three times. there isn't enough computing power on the planet to do that and if there was, there isn't enough electrical supply to feed that computing power.
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Do you think the USD will soon "lose usefulness"? Like that it well cease to be the currency used in the largest economy (on some measures tied with China), in the world and in most of the trade with that country and in trading oil and most commodities?
Okay, suppose you think the USD will no longer be used to trade oil. Well, would you say the Chinese yuan has "lost usefulness"? No oil is traded in RMB, the yuan is hardly used outside of China.
Maybe you think the USD will somehow be used less for other trade? Well, look at the British pound?. That's a fairly small country, after all. If the USD was only used in California, it would still be more used than the GBP. Yet when is the last time you saw the GBP fall 80% in a year, or swing 10% every week?
If you are worried about losing usefulness, bitcoin should be poison to you. It is used for virtually nothing, compared to what actual currencies are used for.
There are many rreasons but one is that it is practically non-existent in terms of how much there is. There iscabout $3.5BN of bitcoin out there. That is nothing - it is such a trivial amount, by the standards of anything that wants to be called a currency. If anyone slightly big wanted to, bitcoin could be manipulated so easily. It trades about $2MM a day. How would you like to run your business on bitcoin, contract for X bitcoin tomorrow, then someone pushes a hundred thousand dollars of trades, jerks bitcoin around by 20%, and wipes out your profit.
Also, I see bitcoin miners have daily revenue about $1MM and total bitcoin capitalization is $3.5BN. So the supply of bitcoin supply is inflating 10% per year. I gather it is designed to continue to grow at a slowly declining rate for some decades more. That isn't enough growth to make bitcoin big enough to be a real currency.