I read your article which was surprisingly in-depth. I think your perspective on previous bubbles is very helpful but there are a few inaccuracies there when it comes to the technical details of Bitcoin...it's hard to say with one reading if correcting them may change much in terms of a conclusion but if you are interested, I'll go point them out in an email.

It's called arbitrage and you can think of it like a financial circuit. Sell bitcoins and get Pesos. Sell Pesos to get something else (USD?). Sell that something else for bitcoins. Repeat.

As long as you're charging enough fees to cover your costs, you can make money this way and help people protect their assets with a far more trustworthy, even gold-like currency.

Except that bitcoins don't just sit in a cabinet looking pretty. The purpose they serve is to send value from one party to another without requiring the trust of any third party. Transfers happen within an hour or two with fees ranging from 0-1% depending on if you're starting and/or ending with bitcoins.

If bitcoins become worthless in the future, it will only be because another decentralized payment system (probably based on Bitcoin) will have made a significant improvement. People are trying all the time to release a new Bitcoin with some more attractive properties but the system is very good, it's hard to improve upon while still maintaining the decentralized, trust-free essence at its core.

Second life currency cannot be stored outside Linden Labs system. It is just an entry in their database. With Bitcoin, you have your private keys and any money assigned to them is under your sole control. Of course, you may place your private keys in a foolish place but it is your duty to yourself to take precautions in relation to the value therein.

I'm not familiar with second-life banks but I doubt they were truly able to hold SLL so that they were under their sole control. Linden Labs could always claim TOS violation and remove the money from their account. Not so with Bitcoin which is why you keep hearing about the system. It's a genuinely different virtual currency.

What you're seeing with Bitcoin is sort of like raw access to the Visa network and I'm surprised more theft doesn't occur. As you pointed out it's nontrivial to have a secure computer nowadays.

As the infrastructure evolves we are likely to see payment processors that use things like multi-sig transactions and stronger security measures to insulate the user from such concerns. Even then, you'll still have the freedom to operate independently.

Freedom(tm) - A (previously?) core value of the /. community.

As far as you know. And you know as well as anyone that data copied need not be used immediately. I won't say that every Bitcoin business has been or will be above board but the fact that there is a public transaction log makes certain activities very hard to hide or explain away. As for reclaiming stolen funds, the largest thefts occur at the top. MF Global for example is missing $1.2-1.6 billion. That is an amount of money that can affect millions of people in ways they would feel.

Here there's no progress bar. Just a single packet broadcasted across a p2p network and subsequently locked into the blockchain by the processing power of the entire network. If you're any kind of geek at all, you should appreciate the beauty of the system even if you think it's going to ruin your way of life.

It is not classified as legal tender by the government but that doesn't mean it's illegal to use. Case in point, hundreds of local currencies in use around the country (Ithaca dollars, Disney dollars). What you can't do is refuse USD as payment for debt, the commonly quoted case being when you go to dinner and pay the bill after eating. There you are in debt and the restaurant must accept USD in the US.

The same could be said of converting a bank balance to cash. Your implication that using Bitcoin = jail time makes me wonder what your concern is against people being able to spend their money as they wish (something that is again still largely possible with cash).

Using money to buy illegal things is not laundering in itself. Money laundering requires that bad money be mixed in with the good stream of what looks to be a legitimate business. Again, I must ask if you have a reference for such an occurrence.

Do you have any references to Bitcoin being used in money laundering? Having a hard time finding a concrete story...

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity tl;dr Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous without substantial care in their execution. That being said it's unlikely the theif will be found unless they make a major slip-up.

If Bitcoin were a pump and dump don't you think it would have disappeared after the initial bubble? The fact that it continues to grow in transaction volume and in price stability doesn't count for anything?

In the world of Bitcoin, startups are held to a higher standard when it comes to transparency. How many $87k thefts do you think occur on a daily basis with other companies? How many of those do you think you would hear about if they did happen? Usually when we hear of technology it's always in the multi-millions either of dollars or of records compromised.

Nature of the beast. To be fair though, one could ask the same of USD or Paypal or any other tech company's stock. You sort of have to assume that some of the techies you know own Bitcoin. I own some but I like to think that doesn't bias me any more than necessary as to the system's benefits and drawbacks.