[Luis Dias]

It's not a good substitute - I can't think of one. "Creative destruction" was the closest in darwinian spirit that I came with, but it doesn't really fit with this (it's more about the innovations destroying older activities rather than the process of selection itself).

[karajorma]

I'd be tempted to call it the Elop Award since on the face of it, that's an example of stupidity leading to a loss of vast amounts of cash, but there's some suggestions that Elop may have actually deliberately ****ed Nokia over in return for a pretty huge bonus soon after the Microsoft takeover.

[Lt Manshield]

No bitcoin mockery discussion is complete without a mention of the fact that Mt.Gox was originally Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange.
A magic online card trading site becoming the major bitcoin exchange is hilarious on its own, but somehow the people runing it seem to have become less competent at coding and security in the process (or maybe it's just full of scammers like many things in bitcoin land)

Regarding bitcoin itself, bitcoin tends to get advertised because
1) no regulation
2) it's deflationary (Ron Paul 2016 End The Fed, wake up sheeple  )
3) no chargebacks
4) fast transactions for free

No regulation? Gee, that seems to be working out perfectly well since all actors in a free market are rational and, in all transactions, have perfect (or sufficient) information. Anyone breaking the rules will get caught by The Invisible Hand of the market, people refusing to trade because of scammer tags and ~reputation~, or hired hitmen, depending on who you ask.

Deflation? Ah yes, many economies have benefited from long term deflation, such as ___________ . An economy is not at all healthier or more able to grow if money is used instead of hoarded, and "I have 2% of all bitcoins so I should hold onto them and be worth 2% of the future world economy" is a reasonable and productive thing to advocate. Oh, and infinitely divisible bitcoins (by adding more decimals to your balance, so you can split it into smaller units) are not a roundabout way to inflate your way out of deflation related problems in any way, no sir.

No chargebacks? Overall, scammers and shady businesses Captains of Industry win, customers lose. If everyone's honest, it makes literally no difference.

Fast transactions? Sure, everyone waiting about 10 minutes at the bar for the transaction for their pint to be confirmed sounds like a good idea! Also there's totally no fees, except for the fact that transaction fees are a thing and transactions not paying the fee tend to get stuck in the queue for days.

e: In addition, the blockchain thing itself is a problem. IIRC, it currently hovers at around 15 gb and would grow by terabytes every day if it actually included all the transactions happening worldwide...

[Luis Dias]

deflation is actually what has pushed bitcoin from irrelevance to worldwide phenomena. While you are absolutely right that economies shouldn't be deflationary, if you want an alternative "coin" to present itself interestingly to a whole new group of people, there's nothing like a ponzi-scheme-like bubble effect to kickstart the "revolution". Especially when everyone convinces themselves it's not really a ponzi scheme, it's the Next Big Thing.

[Lt Manshield]

deflation is actually what has pushed bitcoin from irrelevance to worldwide phenomena. While you are absolutely right that economies shouldn't be deflationary, if you want an alternative "coin" to present itself interestingly to a whole new group of people, there's nothing like a ponzi-scheme-like bubble effect to kickstart the "revolution". Especially when everyone convinces themselves it's not really a ponzi scheme, it's the Next Big Thing.

However, it makes bitcoin a commodity to hold and sell before the next great crash, and actually makes it less suitable as a currency. Crashes are hard to predict, and small "investors" more or less randomly lose money or get nominally rich (and have trouble cashing out when their exchange implodes).

e: additionally, there is no reason why bitcoin (or litecoin or feathercoin or, god forbid, dogecoin) in particular should become the world digital currency. Contrary to the claim that bitcoins are scarce and backed by math, their actual value for buying stuff is backed by internet libertarians believing really really hard in their value, people selling shovels to the gold diggers GPUs and ASICs to the miners, and silk road clones.

As the ridiculous number of alternative *coins that people have sunk money into demonstrates, cryptocurrency scarcity in general is only constrained by how many people copy-paste an existing piece of code and edit in another name (read: they aren't actually scarce).

[Scourge of Ages]

Relevant: Glorious Hatcoin!

[Mongoose]

I fully support any and all hat-based currencies.

[Dragon]

So do I. If only for the reason that if hats were currency, I could get the drunks who ruined my old one (it was my favorite!) into some very serious trouble...

[Phantom Hoover]

Another one bites the dust

[Mongoose]

In which Bitcoin users discover runs on banks and suddenly realize they aren't backed by the FDIC.

[Phantom Hoover]

the hidden costs of bitcoining

[Kazan]

Can't say I didn't see that coming