On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 3:02 PM Juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 7 Jul 2015 15:21:50 -0400
grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:


> Creating a system in which a Botswanan can give a few bits
> of their impoverished wages to their friend in Mumbai


        What? Bitcoin exists so that rich people in western countries
        especially the US can become even richer. So far it worked
        pretty well.

Really? What rich person has gotten richer through Bitcoin so far? Remittances seem like the biggest use of Bitcoin at the moment. Sure, there's plenty of speculation, but your claim that Bitcoin's purpose is to make the rich richer is also speculation. And FUD.
 
        Bitcoin hasn't led to any meaningful political/economic
        change yet, apart from possibly triggering the demise of
        government cash, which would be a complete disaster. Talk about
        'unintended consequences' (unintended?)

I can't imagine you've read a single thing written by the people who influenced the creation of Bitcoin if you think that the collapse of fiat currencies is an unintended consequence. Any fiat currency that is so bad that its users prefer to use Bitcoin deserves to collapse. Of course, so far, while Bitcoin has become popular in places like Argentina and Venezuela, the US dollar remains by far the more popular alternative currency in those places. And if Greece exits the Euro and starts printing Drachmas there, they will have to worry about people trading their Drachmas for Euros, not for Bitcoin.
 
        A likely scenario exists in which there wouldn't be any
        independent crypto-currency. There would be fully 'traceable'
        electronic currencies controlled as always by the state and the
        banking mafia.

 By what evidence do you estimate that this is a "likely" scenario? You may be right that many nation-states and banks will be loathe to accept an untraceable and uncontrollable crypto-currency, but that's the whole point; they're not going to have a choice. Cryptocurrencies don't have to be legal to be disruptive. The main problem that they've run up against before now is the lack of healthy underground markets to take advantage of them. Given time, governments' and banks' opinions and policies about cryptocurrencies will become irrelevant.