Spats_McGee

Graduated from college in a STEM field, but starting salaries couldn't match what I was doing in the restaurant, so I decided to stay a while.

Did you leave STEM because you wanted to, or because you had to?

As a PhD chemist with 4 years experience in industry (and incidentally) currently unemployed, your salary is about my target range for what I hope to achieve if I'm ever able to land a job again with "Scientist" in the title. So it seems as though you made the "right" decision, speaking from a purely pragmatic perspective.

Isn't the only way to use Bitcoin to avoid harm from a bank failure to keep the bulk of your savings in the form of Bitcoin?

If you were to use asset X as a form of insurance against bank failure, then yes, you would need to own asset X in proportion to the amount that you would want to be protected (replace X with bitcoin, gold, collectible bottlecaps, etc).

And isn't Bitcoin value incredibly volatile?

Yes, but historically volatility has been going down, and it's almost inevitable that it will continue to go down in the long run as more players enter the market.

Bitcoin represents an entirely new type of asset, a digital commodity, that has never existed before. It should be fully expected that large fluctuations in its value continue to take place as the market figures out how to appropriately price this new technology/asset.

Ah, the old "mining centralization" "problem." The recent price dip, with many "industrial" mining operations being forced out of business, would seem to speak against the supposed quasi-monopoly power of these outfits.

The reality is that the system that Satoshi designed was meant to deal with all of this through the mechanism of difficulty adjustment (which, contrary to what many believe, can do up and down). This means that when the price dips, miners who perhaps invested too much capital in too-large operations will get squeezed out of the market, allowing smaller operations with less overhead to pick up the slack.

Mining was always meant to exist just on the edge of profitability; the positive side of this is that it will encourage the development of clean and renewable energy, as miners seek to reduce their energy costs as much as possible.

I've always praised hospitality for the division of one day to the next, such that whatever terribly may have happened today has no influence on tomorrow. Whereas what most other careers offer is value that passes on day to day, week to week, year to year. Both have its merits.

Good way to look at it. Best of luck!

If Bitcoin is decentralized, where are mined bitcoins coming from?

You can imagine bitcoin as a giant ledger book. Mined bitcoins are simply added to "the book" (actually, the blockchain) after the mining computation is verified.

The Bitcoin protocol?

Yes

Wouldn't that be considered centralized?

Why? Mining computations are verified by every computer running the bitcoin software around the globe.

what tools are used to mine them

Mostly, custom-built chips (ASICs) designed specifically to generate the SHA-256 hashes that are required for mining. Look up any bitcoin explainer youtube for more.

Finally, how do the laws of economics work (supply, demand, infaltion etc.) work on decentralized currency?

Supply and demand work like they work anywhere else. There is a fixed supply, and bitcoins are issued on a fixed schedule until 21 million are issued. Demand is still being figured out by the marketplace. :)