GM was at least on the verge of bankruptcy a few years ago, but I'm pretty sure that can be attributed more to massively underestimating how much healthcare would cost in 2008 during a union negotiation several decades prior than to any sort of dirty tricks.
The main thing is that you'd need a new set of abstractions for security, and then you'd need to implement HTML5 on it anyways to do all the things we can do on a computer now.
Currency markets exist, but most currency trading is a lot more short-term.
Holding USD is rarely an investment. You put money in your checking account(as opposed to a savings account/CD, which is an investment in the bank) because you expect to spend it(you know, what money is for?) soon. Only banks hold large amounts of USD and they almost immediately loan it out.
And you're right, it's unfair to compare gold to Bitcoin. There are people actually using Bitcoin as a currency, whereas gold is almost exclusively exchanged for actual currencies, which are then exchanged for goods and services.
And the failure of the Zim dollar is the reason they recently returned to the gold standard. Oh wait, no, they switched to USD.
Hint: the value of USD isn't as an investment. In fact, if the value of USD goes up, that makes it less useful, because the point of having money is to spend it. For example, one of the many reasons of the utter trainwreck of Bitcoin is the fact that more people were holding it as speculation than actually using it to purchase anything.
And it's only 3% in the last year if you aren't trying to compare it to something mid-bubble. The USD is totally going down with respect to tech stocks, guys!
Aren't Bill Gates and Warren Buffett currently trying to spend as much of their money as possible on charity work, as well as lobbying to get the amount of taxes they have to pay increased?
"If you had bought and held the stocks that make up the Dow over 60 or 70 years, you'd have gotten demolished because the Dow constantly shuffles its index."
No, but if you put your money into an index fund, you'd be shuffling your money exactly when Dow did.