>In order to create currency, you have to do a bunch of pointless busywork.
Massively incorrect. The reason the system works as it does is because that "pointless busywork" guards against attackers in the wholly-distributed system. Yes, it makes you coins, but it'll degrade, and the economy would eventually switch over to transaction fees. Its primary purpose is to secure the entire system, not to make money - it's just an incentive to help secure things. The system could easily work (with minor modifications to allow increased divisibility) with a single Bitcoin created at the network's beginning.
>Gold is a stupid inconvenient currency that's worse than paper.
Inconsequential. This is in there only because they mentioned Bitcoin being similar to the gold standard. Why is this a bolded argument point?
>Believing in the gold standard is disbelieving in capitalism.
Um... what? This was clearly incorrect before the US dollar became a fiat currency, and every other currency in the world that's pinned to some resource in a capitalist society. If they're not "believing in capitalism", what are they doing?
>If the gold standard worked, the 1930s depression wouldn't have happened, and we couldn't have recovered, period, from the recent banking crisis.
Under some theories. IANAEconomist, but I'm sure there are others who are with which they could debate this point to no end.
>The ability of governments to print (and destroy) money is a key tool in economic management.
See above.
>... if nobody is controlling the economy, then the economy will act like any uncontrolled complex system: it'll go crazy.
and
>Bitcoin removes government control over the economy, which means there is [NO] control over the economy. (had asterisks for emphasis)
Clearly, this person has never used the internet. Or any other non-government-controlled standard. Though it's a bit more decentralized than that; by that argument, why hasn't Bittorrent failed? Or open source projects? Hell, Github is the ultimate instrument of chaotic doom if this is true.
>FAIL #2: Even if it was a good idea, governments would squash it.
See any discussion on Bittorrent for debates here.
>FAIL #3: The whole technological basis is flawed.
Followed shortly after by: "First of all, I admit, I don't totally understand the bitcoin algorithms and systems. I don't really need to."
Oh boy. Where to start there. I guess I'll start with "yes, you do, to claim that". It's an eye-opening, not-yet-penetrated, very-ingenious system. It's simple and extraordinarily solid, if you accept the current premises of an enormous amount of our security systems which have stood for many years against many attacks.
>FAIL #4: It doesn't work offline.
Neither do credit cards. They're clearly failing because of this. If it were to take over, your phone could easily handle everything. They already are handling some transaction systems.
>a single failure of the cryptosystem could result in an utter collapse of the entire financial network. Unlimited inflation. Fake transactions. People not getting paid when they thought they were getting paid. And the perpetrators of the attack would make so much money, so fast, that they could apply their fraud at Internet Scale on Internet Time.
Depends on the single point of failure, actually. And such a failure would also doom an enormous amount of our security systems, it'd be catastrophic in other ways as well to say the least.
More pointedly: a break in the entire system would mean a loss of trust in the entire system. How, precisely, would this leave the perps with scads of money? It's not like it would go un-noticed.
>The current financial system is slow, and tedious, and old, and in many ways actually broken or flawed. But one thing we know is that it's [RESILIENT]. One single mathematical error will not send the whole thing into a tailspin. With bitcoin, it will. (had asterisks for emphasis)
Don't they remember the huge dip in the stock market not too long ago, caused by algorithmic traders? On a "resilient" note only, mind describing our current economic situation?