Couple of assumptions are being made here and I'm going to go through them point by point. ------- "There is now an indelible and permanent record of the tran

Couple of assumptions are being made here and I'm going to go through them point by point. ------- "There is now an indelible and permanent record of the transfer of funds and that record will never go away." The author is absolutely correct that there is now a permanent record of a transfer funds. But immediately the assumption is being made that such a record is bad, if you're trying to hide your financial activities. In reality, all you see is "Wallet A" sending bitcoins to "Wallet B". While you still need to pay real and traceable money for bitcoins, which can then be tied to your "Wallet A", all one needs to do, for example, is generate a couple of throw-away wallets, split the amount of bitcoins up, send them to each wallet, then use those wallets for the final transfer to "Wallet B". What happens then is that the pot dealer receives, let's say, 10BC, but such an amount has never directly left your wallet in a single transaction and you have no connection whatsoever to the pot dealer. Again, you might be presented with a chain of transfers and you might be asked why you sent 5BC to a random wallet that has only ever been used to forward that money to the pot dealer. But that, by itself, is not illegal. I can send money to whoever I wish right now and, unless I have specific knowledge of their future actions, what they do with the money has nothing to do with me. ------- " That liability never goes away as it was wilfully evaded and yet the ability to track the transaction never goes away either!" Personally, I think this is more about the ethics of tax evasion, rather than a problem with the currency itself. I do not like to blame objects for the actions of people, but the author clearly has a different point of view. ------- "If you wish to fill up your tank with gasoline, for example, few people are going to be willing to wait for 10 minutes, say much less an hour, before being permitted to pump the gas -- or drive off with it." Again, this is a completely valid statement, but the author immediately assumes that BC is the end-all global currency, thus tries to validate his disapproval of bitcoins based on an imaginary problem, that isn't even an actual problem with bitcoins. If bitcoins solve one or two problems, but don't solve a third, is that a valid dismissal of the currency as a whole? Can we not imagine a world where bitcoins are complementary to government-backed currencies? ------- "your value increases because the later person's expenditure of energy increases rather than through your own expenditure of energy." I admit I do not get this one. If I mined 50BC from the start, how do I profit if someone else now mines 25BC? Of course, if the value of BC goes up, as it is doing right now, we both profit, but that has nothing to do with the later person mining bitcoins. Rather it is a normal process where a lot more people are interested in buying bitcoins, so demand goes up along with the price. If no one wanted to use bitcoins, then both people would now be stuck with worthless bits. Also, I disagree with the premise that early adopters shouldn't be rewarded. If I start mining bitcoins right from the start, I carry a much bigger risk of wasting my investment (electricity usage, etc.) than the person that joins later on, once the currency has been established and it seems reasonable that it might be used by millions of people.