http://www.loper-os.org/?p=939

The answer instead is that, while the unknown inventor of Bitcoin was quite clever, most of its users are alarmingly dull.  This includes the “pioneers” who set up Bitcoin-based financial services of every kind.  Why? Because they are pounding in nails with a microscope. These fools have been handed a technology so clever, so disruptive and revolutionary, that the rulers of the world would have to fully unmask themselves as ruthless tyrants in order to suppress it, — or give up their thrones on their own free will — if it were used correctly, that is. But at present, the microscope again and again goes “clang!” against the table, the nails slowly and crookedly creep inward, and tiny shards of the world’s finest lenses fly in all directions.

Bitcoiners are pounding in nails with a microscope, because they have insisted on faithfully re-creating the financial institutions of the meatspace world – banks, stock markets, derivatives trading, and the like – without any of the familiar meatspace law enforcement mechanisms (police and courts) or the best-known traditional black-market alternative to these mechanisms: the threat of immediate physical violence as an incentive to promise-keeping.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the supposed inventor of Bitcoin, could be a Bourbaki or a man in a grey suit drawing an NSA salary.  But whoever he was, he handed this lot of morons a true jewel of “alien technology.” With which they proceeded to knock one another on the head with, exactly as they did with their stone-age cudgels the day before.  Bitcoin allows the user to exchange value without physical proximity, without the use of a central arbitrating authority, anonymously, and without having to trust anyone (save for the “Byzantine-condition” assurance that a plurality of users are running the actual Bitcoin algorithm, and not a subverted version.)  And yet the fools insist on building shoddy copies of meatspace institutions where the cryptographic perfection of this jewel is all for naught, and we’re back to having to blindly trust the user on the other side of the Internet connection when he insists that he will invest our virtual coins in real-world commodities (or the paper imitations thereof), and return some of the proceeds to us in the future.  And with none of the admittedly-limited safeguards of meatspace in the mix. 

Yes, the meatspace universe contains Bernie Madoff, Jon Corzine and their many merry friends.  But in the present-day world of Bitcoin, any digital bum who can set up a Linux box and string together some slick words imagines himself a Corzine.  And, what is far sadder, fools invariably show up, ready to part with their Bitcoins on their own free will.  They give them up in exchange for promises, backed by nothing at all. And then have the gall to complain.