I don't know or care enough about Bitcoin to address any of your technical points -- I'm sure /u/gansmaltz will take that on -- but there are at least two obvious flaws in your claims here:

> People buy and hold it like gold or any other asset they think will appreciate.

I'm old enough to remember when my grandparents were certain that buying a bunch of silver and hiding it in their garage would pay for my college education. When they died, we cleaned it out and sold it for about $20.

... I don't think I need to spell out where I'm going with this. Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

> People don’t necessarily get into Bitcoin because they think a fiat currency is going to fail.

In the early days of Bitcoin, this was the major argument that enthusiasts were using to try to encourage people to get into crypto -- being isolated from the risks of a state-backed fiat currency. So, to hear the crypto community now say that that isn't and wasn't the point, means that some substantial fraction of that community must be lying. Either they're lying now when they say that isn't the purpose, or they were lying 10-15 years ago when they said that that was the purpose, but either way, this doesn't say anything good about whether we should trust the crypto community with our money.

That's just it; there's no such thing as the "original owners" of any piece of land. Anyone who shows up to any unclaimed land and says "well, this is mine now," is at best stealing from everyone, and at worst simply lying. And anyone who then buys that land from that person is complicit in the theft or lie -- they're purchasing stolen goods.

If you mean land that was stolen from the native peoples who lived on it, then (generally) those native peoples understood the concept that the land belongs to everyone, because it is necessary to support everyone. They wouldn't claim to "own" that land because they rightly recognize that land can't validly be owned by a single entity.

(Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in the nuances of historic land policies among Native American tribes and communities, and I'm even less of an expert in how that played out in other parts of the world. I live in the American West, where you pick up a lot of this stuff by osmosis, but if someone with a formal education in this area wants to clarify what I'm saying, corrections are welcome.)

Better yet, who wants to bet that their paywall system is based on a fintech product with its own fraud problems?

Sure, but at the start, people were asking "what are the use cases for this that don't include serious money getting involved?" and the answer that early bitcoin miners gave was basically "uh, I dunno, something something revolution?" So it was obvious that serious money was going to need to get involved, and from that, it was obvious that it would rapidly attract scams and fraud.

Just because early bitcoin miners couldn't read the writing on the wall doesn't mean it wasn't there for others to see.

I mean, it depends on your definition of "fraudulent." If you mean "gonna get you convicted of fraud in court" then barely anything counts as fraudulent because our courts are cowards. If you mean "based on getting people to believe things that are plainly untrue" then nearly every part of the economy is fraudulent. Macroeconomics is based on the untrue claim that the economy can keep doubling every n years without limit. Microeconomics is based on the untrue claim that people always act in their own rational self-interest. And regular everyday economics, in the sense of just selling things to customers, is based on all of the untrue claims in all of the advertising we're exposed to. There really is no such thing as an honest capitalist.

The other irony here is, the entire gaming industry follows what that group of people does with their money. If they buy lots of FPSs, the gaming industry makes more FPSs. If they buy lots of RPGs, the gaming industry makes more RPGs. If they buy lots of games with microtransactions, the gaming industry puts microtransactions in more and more games. Gamers are the ones in control in this interaction. Which means that, if they don't want the merger to be successful, all they have to do is not buy games from those companies anymore.

Now, why would a group of people with all of the control decide that they need to exert their control through the courts instead of through the markets? I'll tell you why: it's because they can't help themselves. This is a group of people with the collective impulse control of a two-year-old. They can't stop themselves from giving money to Microsoft no matter how shitty the games might be post-merger, and they see the lawsuit as an easier option than actually learning impulse control skills like any other reasonable adult. This is not a sympathetic position; this is hundreds of thousands of people simply refusing to grow up.

TL;DR: This lawsuit represents gamers begging the world around them to do the job of being mature on their behalf, instead of sucking it up and growing the self-discipline necessary to make their own choices about how they spend their money.

And what is "US" planning to do about it that stands any meaningful chance of changing Google's behavior?

Which is why big ISPs and conservative voters hate municipal and co-op ISPs.

Too bad, so sad. Let them go suck on a coax connector.

Their search engine?

Not surprising since their entire purpose in life is to waste resources on security theater, instead of making anything safer in any actual, measurable way.

Given that companies of all sizes have demonstrated that they're willing to resort to similar tactics, why does anyone still believe any claim in any advertising? The surest sign that any statement might be untrue is that it came from an advertiser's or marketer's mouth, pen, or keyboard.

"I didn't spend years making a tool for rendering realistic war scenes just to have somebody come along and use it for rendering realistic war scenes!"