system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Bitcoin is an nonviable currency. CMV

It's just a massive bubble right now, facilitated by people with a shared delusion that Bitcoin is the "currency of the future", as if it would somehow replace fiat currencies as the international medium of exchange.

It may well already be the preferred currency by transnational organized crime groups to launder and transfer money. However, it always will derive it's buying power from the ability to exchange it for traditional currency.

There is simply no justifiable reason to buy/mine bitcoin beyond crime, or perhaps as a very-high risk investment.
gpt
There is going to be a cryptocurrency sooner or later. Cryptography and currency were made for each other, as the value of currency always boils down to scarcity and security, which is what cryptosystems are all about.

Modern Fiat currencies rely on a state (a government) controlling the scarcity. There are some upsides to this, because it means they can fiddle with the scarcity in both economic booms and busts to do what they think will improve the situation. For this reason, Fiat currencies will last for a while.

Before Fiat, there was gold and silver, which were naturally scarce, but had the problem of failing to deal with periodic trade imbalances. Nixon took the US off the gold standard because the country was shipping too much physical metal offshore in a period when other countries (particularly Japan's manufactured goods and the Middle East's oil reserves) were enjoying a few decades of superior exports.

Cryptocurrencies, however, don't come from the ground or from cheap labor. Any country can build chip fabs and "mine" for BitCoin gold, and that makes it fundamentally attached to a higher level of abstract wealth. The ultimate level of abstraction, of course, is human intelligence. A smart engineer can build a better ASIC, and it doesn't matter what's in the soil of the country he lives in.

Paper currency is like a kind of proto-BitCoin. Rather than using the difficulty of doing big math to guard the value of a currency token, it uses the difficulty of manufacturing things like the paper (cotton and linen based), the ink, the printers (intaglio, which press the paper into channels of ink rather than surfaces), holograms, plastic strips, watermarks made from fibers coaxed into special matrices, etc. These are all physical "hard problems", which--as it turns out--are not a problem for competing governments that have the resources to solve them.

This was the case with the "superdollar" problem in Iran back in the 80s, for example. When the US was trying to prop-up the Shah's government in the 70s, they shipped him intaglio printers and plates for American $20 bills. When the Ayatollas took over in the revolution, they got up to a lot of mischief with that equipment and made Jeffersons that were indistinguishable from the real thing. Main reason for the redesigns of the last few decades.

You can't do that with a cryptocurrency. Math is hard, and you can't go shopping.

Today's incarnation of BitCoin may have some flaws that will render it worthless, but there's a good chance that we'll either patch those flaws, or eradicate them at a fundamental level with BitCoin 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever. Cryptocurrencies are inevitable, they're cat-out-of-the-bag. They're going to replace both gold and Fiat currencies in the next decade or two because they solve all of the logistical problems currently damaging the Dollar, Euro, Pound, and so-on.

Yes, it's popular with crime. So was (and still is) the Dollar. Yet the security and e-commerce systems you use to buy things from Amazon today were also pioneered by disreputable industries, particularly pornography.

Most mediums of exchange, and all modern "respectable" currencies and commerce systems, come from dubious backgrounds. Ironically, that muddy history has helped, because it meant they were geared for the kind of security and privacy that people want.