Re: Biiiiig speculative play
I don't even agree that it's practical.
The network can handle fewer than three transactions per second. If everyone in the world was using it, they might be able to make one transaction in their lifetime.
There's no guarantee that your transaction will be included in the next block.
It effectively got DOSed recently by flooding the network with thousands of tiny transactions with fees large enough not to be ignored. It cost the person who did it only a few hundred dollars to do so.
The network's energy consumption is on the order of hundreds of kilowatt-hours per transaction, and the miner subsidy is between $5 and $10 per transaction (although this tracks the exchange rate).
To use it you either need to download and synchronise the blockchain (currently 40GB+ and several days), or trust some anonymous third party with your money.
It's certainly good at teaching libertarians (the US sub-species thereof) and anarcho-capitalists exactly why we have banking regulations though.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
