All the reasons cited above are valid concerns to me. That's why my prefered cryptocurrency and the only one I can endorse with mind honesty, is nano (ex RaiBlock). They use multiple blockchains and no mining. So no waste of energy, instant transactions, and no fees. The host of the network nodes are idealists like hosts of tor nodes. There is less corruption in nano space thanks to no gold rush. It doesn't solve the economics though. (supply/inflation/volatility..)

I've head the opinion though that economics could be a part of the system, since lots of those things work with votes already, we can imagine a crypto with director interests and all central bank prerogatives included in the system and the people would have control by votes. so a replica of the current system but with full democracy.

15 hours ago, swiftcoder said:

That may be [citation needed], because so far the major Cryptocurrencies have mostly gained value as they grow, despite rising costs.

Cryptocurrencies have the problem that it's hard to separate there value from there coin value.

What I meant was that as it gains more user the cryptocurrencies become less stable and slows down and becomes less usable and so the cost of maintenance rises. 

Proof-of-stake does improve on this and so does some of thee Hybrid systems but in the end still suffer from the same problems.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against cryptocurrencies. I am against a single unified cryptocurrency.

The reason cryptocurrencies work right now and have such low tax rates is because of how they loose value as they grow. There is a tipping point for them and as long as there is many competing systems there tax rates will stay low.

Rant:

People seam to think that things like the private sector and government sector was build out of greed, when in fact it was build out of necessity to fight against greed. Tax wasn't someones great scheme to make money, it was decided as a fair way to pay for things.

People look at cryptocurrencies and think, "Hey look no tax!" without thinking about what it means if every miner gets 1%.

"The 1% is made up value, there not taking it from my share." Yes they are, by adding in more coins they reduce the value of the coins you have.

We as developers use these tricks in our games, MMO design is the same thing. When you think of it cryptocurrencies is just a MMO.

20 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

People seam to think that things like the private sector and government sector was build out of greed, when in fact it was build out of necessity to fight against greed. Tax wasn't someones great scheme to make money, it was decided as a fair way to pay for things.

Nice, I think that's a good perspective and a bit of fairness is overdue in the debate.

19 hours ago, deltaKshatriya said:

Also I'd add, crypto isn't anything new in terms of pure tech. It's just a new combination of tech. Much of the tech has existed before and in some cases, is already being used.

Absolutely, that's what I start with in my article (linked in OP).

11 hours ago, slayemin said:

The "value" of crypto currency is driven purely by speculative hype.

True. But there is indeed a small amount of bias for increase in value. Pure speculation would not leave you with more than 50/50 chance of loss vs profit. However, if we take BTC: that is a coin with a fixed supply, because of people who lose their keys (coin burning), and because of the entropy in the real economy "always rising" (added value theory), BTC is a deflationary currency by nature, which means it IS an investment.
Also there is a bandwagon effect which is why some people have accused it of being a Ponzi (more people coming is the reason for rise in value, which is not sustainable -> pyramid effect.) But I refute this accusation in my article.

12 hours ago, slayemin said:

Warren Buffet is wisely staying far away

So this comment has been a subject of extensive discussion in the field, and this doesn't have to be a red flag at all. Buffet said he will not invest in Apple either. You take it or leave it if your personality matches his, that's all, but it's not an absolute red flag. Authority is not an argument (one of the rhetoric fallacies).

12 hours ago, slayemin said:

I believe they're operating a pump and dump scheme

This is very much and sadly true, not so much in BTC because of the very large capitalization, but on other smaller coins it's the wild wild west and lots have been left holding the bag. I personally think this is not a problem at all, and it's a anarcho liberal point of view, the thing is just to be aware of this and hedge according to risks you can take, if you can't, just don't play, but there is no need to dismiss the game altogether because the players are rough.

2 hours ago, Lightness1024 said:

(more people coming is the reason for rise in value, which is not sustainable -> pyramid effect.) But I refute this accusation in my article.

But it isn't sustainable. That is why we need multiple Cryptocurrencies.

I don't believe it's a scam, it's just the nature of any money system, there have been a few currencies before that died of similar effect; a few even died because of the opposite effect.

It's the whole reason Cryptocurrencies need to fluctuate. As long as they keep rising and falling in value they can sustain them self. Because don't forget they don't have a government who can sustain them.

Cryptocurrencies are meant for small trades, but investing money into them is just gambling.

On 12-2-2018 at 3:52 PM, deltaKshatriya said:

The Federal Reserve, in case of the USD, dictates monetary supply policy to combat inflation,

Wrong, they PRINT more money to have more money, they  do it with policy to not CAUSE too much inflation. Most if not all cryptocurrencies have a limited supply.

On 13-2-2018 at 5:45 PM, Scouting Ninja said:

Tax wasn't someones great scheme to make money, it was decided as a fair way to pay for things.

Tax was someone's scheme to produce military and thus tax more areas. People accepted taxation and have ever since been trying to make taxation work more for the common good.

Also, miners and transaction-fees are differnet things then taxation, miners mean inflation, though the max. amounts of coins for a given CC has already been pre-defined. (oh, and you HAVE to pay REAL taxes over CC's, anything that has value is taxable.)

@Lightness1024: there is no advantage to having only one currency, as a user you just gotta remember you don't have to use them all, you just use whatever currency suits your needs best(aka you can pay with it in a local store)

Crypto currencies are the future, not now and maybe not in next 50 years but a time will come where we will pay digital only. Take a look at Paypal for example, it is comfortable and today really convinient to pay with Paypal and even Skype now implements a payment service (I never sayd I trust Microsoft ). I agree to all the backdraws that come up here saying that all for primary Bitcoin as the dinosaur of CCs has massive problems but I wont see it as the future of payment rather than a toybox so one could experiment and extend the technology for a Bitcoin 2.0 however it will be named then.

I study CCs for a long time know since 2014 (and yes this is ages in technology) and I saw the evolution, anonymity, more anonymity, even more anonymity and mathematical improvments to make data blocks smaller and security higher. The core technology is very interesting to me.

The pros are uncontroversial there while the cons are there too. The most given argument is that CCs at the moment arent very stable in value but to solve this we should first take a look at the history of money. People found/harvested something (I may remeber it were shells as the first really trading value) that other people also liked to have and trade other goods and services for. It became convinient because you wont be in the need to carry a chicken anymore for trading that against something else over a long road and back home; letting other new business grown up like merchants or money changer (that later become banks)

Complete History of Money

I see this as the primary advantage of any CC regardless how it is implemented at the end, that people can carry there values without any major drawbacks. You wont need a bank account anymore (what I think is the main reson that CCs will not establish so far because companies earn money with your money) that disables the need for storing fees you have to pay. Without a bank account you also wont need an address that is why some homeless people cant get work in our countries (you need a home to get a bank account to get a job to get a home = fail!). Ever payed for bank card, print your own ones with CCs. It dosent take time to change your account like two weeks for the traditional way, it does just take a few seconds and you are done. Payment (could be) as fast as hell, while you have just to scan a QR code on checkout and your partner in contract gets nearly instant message about success or failure while you can also pay at weekend or holiday out of the usual business hours.

Transactions are as safe as the crypto problem is and unless someone invents the quantum computer, they will stay so (while even with our other currencies will get unsafe with a quantum computer) and anonymous if used correctly. This might be a point where people will discuss about but my opinion is that government should not know about what/who I pay nor has it the right to denie access or steal my money for whatever reason. Tax crime is a problem today but I dont think it will be a greater problem in a CC scenario. People will then just be forced to make a tax sheet what most companies and self-employed persons are need to do anyways so government can still check for tax crime while no-one other can investigate a persons payment history just from the blockchain.

Evaluating payments costs energy and so money this is fact but also fact is that any other of our digital payments today costs energy as well. But with a CC based payment system people offering computing power could earn money and so have the flow of currency units never stopped. I calculated with a fixed ammount of transaction fees that are measured not on value but on size of the transaction. It is not the transaction value that consumes the power but every block of bytes so why not pay per block where a block is big enougth to hold the information for one payment plus a bit extra. Larger payments or bigger payment bundles will then be at a higher cost because they take the space of smaller payments while transfering other values, for example contracts would also cost a bit more. I would give that money however to the evaluating network node to give an appeal to the human kind to take part at the system. However the crypto problem should be solved on evaluation, it should be fair and I also think we need multiple evaluations in parallel to get all the payment traffic done in the future.

I think the above can also help keeping the value stable because currency units are always in flow until the whole system stops working while I agree that the CC value should be something physical too. It is right that countries print there own money and print more money as some of them might have in gold and other values. Occasionally a reason for countries to make debts and get into insolvency. The backdraw on Bitcoin was that when the blockchain starts the first time, the inventors of Bitcoin should have taken a huge ammount of coins for themselfs before going into real public traffic. I thought about it and in my opinion there should be an initial fixed value of currency units equal to the financial value of a country spread to each country taking part at the system. So you will never ever have more units as are sealed by the value of a country. Countries give there currency units to citizens and may give or take currency units to keep the currency stable.

There are also a little more problems CCs have to solve in the future but I think this hits the core discussion