> Bitcoin could be hugely beneficial for fledgling financial systems, and robust financial systems can be hugely beneficial for billions of people.

The latter part is true, but BTC cannot provide that. It's nothing more than a nifty hack. It kind of works, which is impressive, but it is horrible inefficient and impossible to scale due to its inherent limitations. So far the only solutions that have been proposed were to tack on even more complexity. To make matters worse, all of these solutions have remained vapourware for quite some time.

> Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by it, though.

How? It would have not prevented the Dotcom Bubble. It would have not prevented the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. It would have not kept Argentina or Greece from borrowing way too much money. It's a libertarian pipe dream that Bitcoin will magically solve all of the world's economic problems. In fact, it would make matters worse due to unpredictable volatility and its lack of scalability. It would only drag any country trying to adopt it into a deflationary death spiral. There is a reason why the gold standard has been abolished.

> The latter part is true, but BTC cannot provide that. It's nothing more than a nifty hack. It kind of works, which is impressive, but it is horrible inefficient and impossible to scale due to its inherent limitations. So far the only solutions that have been proposed were to tack on even more complexity. To make matters worse, all of these solutions have remained vapourware for quite some time.

It is not a given that Bitcoin cannot scale, even though a select few in the ecosystem repeat this as if it is a fundamental truth.

Bitcoin is proposed by many in the ecosystem to scale as it has been before: By scaling up transactions on the chain. See http://www.bitcoinclassic.com/

> "Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by it, though."

To give an example of this, Bitcoin appears to be growing in popularity in Greece:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/rollout-1000-bitcoin-atms-planned-g...

http://www.coindesk.com/has-the-greek-crisis-increased-bitco...

> Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by it, though.

That may be true, however, every time we've replaced one currency with another there have been unforeseen consequences decades or centuries later.

One dead-simple example: A bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal places and there is a limited supply. It is deflationary. No, that isn't a good thing (ignoring short-term greed). What happens when we either mine all the bitcoins, or mining more becomes computationally impossible? How do you run a business when the minimum possible amount of currency increases by $1 every day? You have a piece of bread worth $3, but the minimum amount someone can give you is $5 (then $6, then $7). Suddenly this deflationary currency that was supposed to fix everything has resulted in global hyperinflation.

"So we'll just switch to a new system at that point." We can't get countries to drive on the same side of the road, use the same measurement system or even upgrade to IPv6. How on earth are you going to roll out a global currency change overnight? Bitcoin stakeholders can't even agree on much smaller changes at the moment.

Call it a commodity, sure. It is not a viable long-term currency.

If that ever becomes a problem, there's Ether to the rescue.

You can easily add more decimals with a soft fork, or with a sidechain.

See: second-to-last paragraph.

What change that's less significant than allowing individual satoshis to be further divided has been refused as a soft fork? (Bigger blocks is far more significant.)

You don't even need a fork, you can just use off chain middlemen that add extra units, or if it's done as a sidechain then no agreement is needed and it's all on chain.

I think many people would say that bitcoins aren't apolitical, but a new kind of gold buggery. Making it difficult in principle for a government treasury or a central bank to make certain kinds of decisions about monetary policy is political.

I guess it's political in the same was as encryption is.

Encryption makes it difficult for the government to make certain kinds of decisions as well.

Yes, but in the case of encryption we have competing issues relating to commerce, privacy, crime, and national security that have to be considered and weighed - which is a political process. In the case of gold buggery all we have is a political ideology of unrelenting suspicion of government trying to enforce through law or technology ideas about monetary policy that fall well outside of the economic mainstream all in service of depriving government of tools we know to be very effective at influencing the economy.

Also a ton of people who want to get rich.

Would you say the suspicion is justified in, say, Venezuela or Zimbabwe?

Well their citizens have the option of using an alternative currency such as the USD or Euro or whatever if their leaders really screw up, and it doesn't seem right that you should lock out policy tools from developing countries just because the occasional despot or incompetent screws up fiscal and monetary policy. Eventually many of these countries or regions, with luck, will mature into stable states with competent civil servants that should have the full suite of tools that our civil servants use and employ. Not be locked into a limited child's toy tool set just because their predecessors were less than competent.

> Well their citizens have the option of using an alternative currency such as the USD or Euro or whatever if their leaders really screw up

Only on the black market, realistically.

I'm sure the leaders will do a much better job if they know the populace has alternatives to switch to.

> Not be locked into a limited child's toy tool set just because their predecessors were less than competent.

Bitcoin isn't taking away anyones money printing machine. It just makes pushing the lever less attractive.