Do you realise that there is more than one government in the world?
And those nations capable of standing their ground against the U.S (China, Russia, etc) wouldn't stand against them because it's in their best interests too. In fact, it appears Russia and China are becoming more strict on Bitcoins than even the U.S is. China and Russia don't like not having total control.
* No, you’re still going to pay taxes on your bitcoins.
* No, if you fraud someone, you’ll still have to give them their money back.
* No, bitcoin is totally meaningless if you can’t pay for food in it.
With bitcoin it is a little different, bitcoin ATM's have usually quite ridiculous premiums. I think the most used one in our town has 5% both ways.
Who are they selling it to? Or by "market rate" do you just mean "the same rate that other gold buyers in the same town will pay"?
Since gold buyers are large/frequent market participants who deal with rare/sporadic market participants, I would have been strongly inclined to bet that gold buyers would buy below market and sell "at market". The guy walking into a gold buyer's shop to sell his gold probably isn't just testing to see what kind of price he can get. The gold buyer will happily wait to sell his gold until the price is right, though. That's his job.
* Do "bitcoin proponents" dream about defrauding people at a disproportional rate? This has been the opposite of my experience.
* It's already pretty easy to buy food with bitcoin.
The levels of fraud in Bitcoin are vastly higher than in other money systems like credit cards. Even if you count just one incident, Mt. Gox, the % of bitcoins that have been stolen is immense.
So, yes there are definitely lots of Bitcoin proponents dreaming about (and actually carrying out) fraud!
Check #bitcoin-assets on freenode, I hung out there for a few weeks, and it’s... crazy.
"How will the government force me to pay taxes? I don’t own bitcoins, I merely happen to have the piece of knowledge that is required to spend them"
In my town there were couple of regular markets accepting btc. However I heard they stopped accepting it, because of transaction speeds. I guess there is still one left.
Thuisbezorgd, the largest site for ordering take-out food in the Netherlands accepts bitcoin.
And it probably never will be – transactions speeds are horrible (even international wire transfers through SEPA are faster than Bitcoin transactions) and the energy usage of the mining systems is growing exponentially.