Just to add to some of the other great responses here:
The British empire was built on the back of the Pound -- the first truly international, modern fiat currency. It reigned until it was muscled out by the fiat Dollar.
An immense amount of wealth has been generated for humankind on the backs of fiat currency.
And one more thing...
Bitcoin is also a fiat currency in the sense that it does not contain intrinsic value. It is only as valuable as its network effect. If the network falls in love with a different coin, bitcoin dies.
SMTP is the protocol that is used for basically all email, and it does not provide encryption. There are versions of the protocol that DO, however they cannot be used in isolation. Emails hop from source to destination via a bunch of SMTP relay servers, and since nearly all SMTP servers support the legacy protocol and do not support key exchange, encrypted SMTP traffic will bounce.
When you use gmail, your connection to Google is secure. But if the recipient of your message is not @gmail.com, the message leaves Google's servers in plain text over SMTP. If the recipient is @gmail.com, the message stays inside the Google network.
The point is, all of our emails traverse the internet in plain text unless we use custom solutions (eg. PGP at both endpoints) or send emails within a network (eg. Gmail to Gmail).
What I've realized as a designer is that users don't care about or notice design ... shadows, gradients, rich backgrounds, noise filters, etc. They just don't notice such things. They move so fast from page to page, all they notice is WHETHER OR NOT the page lives up to its purpose. That's the start and end of their experience and it's all over in literally a second.
Is the user expecting to read an article?
If so, then they will simply be blind to anything that isn't the title and text of the article. If they do notice something that isn't the article, you've probably intruded on their experience --- either with an ad, or a fixed element, or a sudden splash page "subscribe for more great content" ... and they don't care about the four CSS effects that will trigger on parent and child elements in your nav on :hover. They won't notice.
So get over it! Design simple pages. They'll load faster, break in fewer browsers, and probably convert users more effectively.
The site that won the competition is slick, cool, and genteel. Very effective, very appropriate for a government.
It's a win for everyone when a seminal tech company responds to Snowden material with a serious response. It compels the public to take the outlet seriously (Der Spiegel), the material seriously (Snowden), and it contributes to the general tightening in the security field.
The problem with your statement is that there may be a new digital currency that displaces Bitcoin ... namecoin, anycoin, litecoin, dogecoin. Maybe not one of those, but a 2.0 of some sort that attracts the miners.
If a NEW Bitcoin equivalent takes the spotlight and Bitcoin miners retrofit their rigs to mine for the new network, then someone that had put all of their money into Bitcoin could lose it all.
Nothing guarantees the continued use of Bitcoin. It is a decentralized fiat currency.
The British empire was built on the back of the Pound -- the first truly international, modern fiat currency. It reigned until it was muscled out by the fiat Dollar.
An immense amount of wealth has been generated for humankind on the backs of fiat currency.
And one more thing...
Bitcoin is also a fiat currency in the sense that it does not contain intrinsic value. It is only as valuable as its network effect. If the network falls in love with a different coin, bitcoin dies.