> the perfect digital currency: they’re frictionless, anonymous[...]
seem to suggest that the author has read a lot about bitcoin (by other authors), but not investigated that deeply. (As for the content: It's bogus mainly because they're at best pseudo-anonymous, or rather: Actual anonymous payment via bitcoin takes a lot of effort to conceal. And it may only be frictionless for now - looking at the way transaction fees develop in the future is one of the most exciting concepts about it, to me.)
> Inflation is bad, but deflation is worse. [...] People hoard their cash, and spend it only begrudgingly, on absolute necessities.
I see how that is very different from the way capitalism works at the moment. But, conceptually, would it really be that bad?
I think an economy that builds on people buying loads of crap they don't need is at least comparatively bad. We certainly seem to have a problem with using more than we need from the planet.
> And they certainly don’t spend it on hiring people — no matter how productive their employees might be, they’d still be better off just holding on to that money and not paying anybody anything.
Again, wouldn't the result just be that you only hire people who create more value than deflation? And wouldn't "nobody paying anybody anything" eventually cause inflation?
Finally, a lot of the arguments employed seem rather shoddy.
This is the argument against being your own bank:
> In Hollywood, if you show someone counting out huge sums of cash, that’s an easy way for the director to say that he’s a criminal.
This is the argument trying to discredit bitcoins principle of mistrust:
> Bitcoin, in that sense, is anti democratic. It’s based on mistrust rather than trust, it refuses to take any responsibility onto itself – indeed, it doesn’t even have a self to take responsibility onto.
So far so half-good...
It’s nihilistic[...].
Nope, does not follow.
> I do have hope that in the future, someone, somewhere, is going to learn from bitcoin’s mistakes, and build a better system.
The author seems to suggest that this is his conclusion, but I thought that was the main idea in bitcoin itself. That it's artificial limit is a rather clear "we will have to come up with something better by then". Not as a "we will never need more bitcoins than this many".
I may be wrong here, but didn't Satoshi set up bitcoin precisely to be a testing ground? Beta Software? The author seems to be a little too occupied putting words in his mouth to actually read the concepts. Instead, he claims that Satoshi wants bitcoin "to be the perfectly anonymous payment mechanism for a digital world". I don't think that's true.