The big problem with BitCoin is the massive amounts of electricity people are using to mine it. Not very ecologically friendly. I understand that they didn't want to make it too easy to "find" BitCoins as that could be inflationary. Still, perhaps they could have come up with a different scheme for "finding" coins? Maybe something that would solve actual problems like protein folding or something - at least then the electricity being used would be used to solve actual problems in the real world.

> moreover bitcoin is in a deflationary bubble right now anyway even though only a fraction of possible coins have been mined.

Indeed. Because the number of users of BitCoin is growing faster than the growth in BitCoin supply. And growth in BitCoin supply is very slow (and getting slower) at this point. This seems to be the big problem with the scheme: Like gold there is a finite supply that grows very slowly and this inevitably leads to deflation (falling prices denominated in BitCoin) which means holder of BitCoin will not be incentivized to spend BitCoin. Fortunately, BitCoin is a parallel currency and not our only currency.

A better scheme would have been to grow the supply of BitCoin at the same rate as the growth of people in the BitCoin "economy". That would lead to a stable currency instead of a speculative one.

Still, that would be the first thing to suspect. I would hope they checked it and double checked it.