OT: Bitcoin and blockchain

My 2 cents (consider I have some understanding of blockchain and high finance :)

1. Invest at your own risk in bitcoin or alt coins. Do not enter from short side if you are not a trader, monitor your investment every 15 min ( atleast every hour) and run like hell when value starts falling over 20%, you cannot predict where will it fall and falls are extremely fast (in minutes). Avoid holding overnight position.

2. Baby talk explanation: Bitcoin is one use case of blockchain. The blockchain technology is still raw. To avoid central clearing or authorization, the idea was to create a problem that takes very high computation to be solved. And the general way to solve is just trying all possible solutions like hit and trial. A large number of people (miners) running special machines ( antminer/ bitfury) are doing this hit and trial (hashes at 10 to the 12th power) every second. ANY RANDOM PERSON CAN GET THE SOLUTION. Then its easy to verify by others and the chain continues.
The disadvantage of creating this randomness to decentralize the process is wasting a lot of electricity (compute power) to get to the solution. TODAY to mine 1 bitcoin/ persist 1 block of transaction/ 1 solution, it takes 1000 dollars in China ( cheap electricity) .
People want to do this as long as the cost benefit makes sense.

3. Will blockchain rule the world, not in the next 20 years. Its still in nascent phase. People in high finance have no problem with centralized authentication and authorization, verification and reporting. Govt want to control inflation and economy by expaning and contracting the money supply (not possible with blockchain)

4. Satoshi will rise (philosophically and transformationally) . but the applications will be totally different than what seem obvious today.
Smart contracts and public records are the 2 things that will be on blockchain. Not much progress in any other application now.

Don’t give them your money yet.