> IMHO, Bitcoin is secure enough for its current main use-case, which seems to be escaping Yuan / Bolivar. But I might be proven wrong. It's also interesting to note some other black swans may trigger cryptocurrency adoption in 2017 [1].

I don't follow bitcoin very closely. Could you please tell me more about escaping yuan/bolivar? It seems to me that if you have access to bitcoin, it means you have banking capabilities and access to the internet. Once you have these two, you can use paypal or similar and store EUR or USD. Volatility of USD is way lower than bitcoin?

You can buy bitcoin with cash via localbitcoins.com in most countries except Germany (or at least, with a German IP address).

In China it seems the preference is to buy bitcoin mining equipment in yuan and generate bitcoin to sell, taking advantage of the cheap electricity available in China and writing off some of the capital investment via tax. Although there is significant trade on Chinese exchanges much of this is often thought to be suspect due to the lack of trading fees which means fake/self trades are available at no cost.

> you can use paypal [to] store EUR or USD [from yuan]

How would you do this?

If it is possible to exchange yuan to usd and keep it in paypal without a US account, I would still be very uncomfortable storing hundreds of thousands of dollars in it. It is a centralized entity that can freeze funds for any reason, be compelled to report things, make mistakes, paper trail, etc.

Being able to exchange currencies is also a step above regular banking I believe. You need access to forex markets and the associated setup and trails.

> I don't follow bitcoin very closely. Could you please tell me more about escaping yuan/bolivar?

Likely means using Bitcoin to evade currency controls, which they have in China and some South American countries e.g. Argentina[1].

[1] http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-thriving-argentinas-black-ma...

Bitcoin will get all features that Monero has, but security is still the most important aspect, so the maintainers take a very slow, conservative path (which I think is awesome for something so important). Segwit is still a great first step. It will take multiple years to get there...there's no rush though. People who really believe in BTC understand that it's not something that will be finished in 5-10 years.

Bitcoin will get a minimum block reward that ensures miner incentives in perpetuity? Bitcoin will switch from secp256k1 to Curve25519? Bitcoin will get a dynamic block size limiter that adjusts with transactional demand?

You must be joking.

Dynamic block size makes it harder to reason about security of the system, so it's not a conservative choice. Adding another curve for signing won't be hard with segwit, the only question is if there is really enough demand for it (and it doesn't need a ,,switch'', both curves can be supported at the same time, and users can select which they want to use). One of the most interesting ideas right now that may be implemented in the future is mimblewimble, unless something better comes. But there are many other, easier to implement ideas talked about on the scaling bitcoin conferences.

I might not use either ever.

But Zooko's name is well-known around the traps whereas Monero -- not.