Thanks for your message, I appreciate that you considered the request even if you chose not to pursue it further.



I agree that you should not TELL people to invest resources into bitcoin. You could choose to educate them about it, but only if you feel it has value for your audience. It is clear that you do not, at this point. It seems that in ten years, we will know whether I was right or wrong!



I do own some bitcoins, but not more than I could afford to lose, and I would never suggest anyone invest in anything because I do - whether it is bitcoin or anything.



With Bitcoin, there are certainly risks, from cryptography being broken, to communication channels blocked, to behind the scenes government involvement with the miners / developers (and I can't say with any kind of certainty that this is not happening right now, or will not happen in the future).



I also agree that a lot of the terminology used in bitcoin is incorrect - indeed bitcoin is not a coin (it is a chain of transactions, sent to addresses, spendable by the person who has the private key that unlocks that address). A bitcoin wallet is not a wallet (it is a list of private cryptographic keys), and mining involves no digging (it is finding cryptographic hashes with unique characteristics that take a predictable amout of computer power to find). And you are right, in that it is programmable money. At the core of every transaction, there is a tiny computer program that dictates who can spend the transaction. The term bit computer program is not accurate, as it misses the concept of scarcity. Other than that, it is spot on. It implies that you can copy it, like you can with a regular computer program, and then you would have two of them. With bitcoin, this is not possible. Digital scarcity is the real innovation of bitcoin, not the blockchain. The blockchain is just a ledger, and they have been around for the longest of times. That is why the private blockchains that the banks are talking about add no value at all, they could just use a database. They use your definition of bit computer money.



I'm still on-the-fence as to whether bitcoin is a fragile technology. It is the only computer system that I know of, that has been running flawlessly for 7 years even while being attacked, upgraded, and growing exponentially at the same time. With zero downtime. The decentralized nature gives it a lot of strength. The reason that I am still undecided on this issue is because there is significant centralization of mining power in China (the miners order transactions into the blockchain), and just a handful of people control a supermajority of this mining power. It is very centralized, in just one jurisdiction, and I consider that a risk.



If bitcoin breaks, it will be due to these kinds of centralizations in an otherwise decentralized system.