Fortunately, bitcoin needs only a handful supporters to run smoothly, and if some critics can draw more public attention to bitcoin, then better!

I don't think it's that black and white.  You can love an idea but still provide critique.  Critical thinking is a good thing.

At genesis, this project wasn't perfect.  Nor is it in its current state.  Critics can help to point out these flaws so they can be fixed.  I think the main differentiator is someone who provides constructive criticism vs someone who just posts to start fights. 

I would go so far as to say everyone here should be a critic.  Look at things objectively, maybe even take the devil's advocate stance from time to time.  One critic (not to be confused with troll or scammer) will do more good for the longevity of Bitcion than 10 blind followers.  IMO, of course.

I wouldn't say that all of them do. Some are trolls and are intentionally trying to derail the project because they want to see good things fail. Others are just plain stupid. There's certainly some overlap there.

Of course, there are the occasional critics who actually manage to find flaws and discuss them intelligently. There's a larger number of people who think they've discovered a flaw and haven't.

The problem is there's rampant fanboyism to the point that legit issues with bitcoin are not being addressed.

For example, you all think bitcoin is decentralized, it's not.  The last few days should be proof of that in that price slowly declined as a result of Euros not being able to deposit.

While it's not centralized, if you removed a few key pieces, the system would fail (MtGox or Dwolla for example).  And if you're at all familiar with online poker, the US government has no problem doing this.  Please don't remind me that MtGox is in Japan, PokerStars is located on the Isle of Man, and Full Tilt is in Ireland.  The US DOJ has long arms.

Secondly, everyone who participates in bitcoin are forced to be speculators.  In the traditional currency world you have many instruments for hedging.  You buy your stock in your currency, buy a futures contract for the currency you wish to sell your product in, sit back and relax, you will not gain or lose on currency price fluctuations.

Thirdly, the same corrupt systems that bitcoin is the solution to, are starting to sprout up in the exchanges.  Fucking darkpools.  They are not necessary for bitcoin.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and now we've taken a significant portion of bitcoin trading off the grid.  

Fourth, do any of you realize how much power Magic Tux has on the price of bitcoin?  I'm not suggesting anything, I'm simply stating the fact that if this *ONE PERSON* (aka NOT DECENTRALIZED) wanted to use underhanded tactics to move price, he could, and all the other exchanges would follow suit because MtGox has 90% of the volume.


Use and enjoy bitcoin, but don't be blind to it's massive problems.

I would disagree with that statement.  Bitcoin is what the community has made it.  The idea of bitcoin may be impossible to fully implement as intended in the real world, and how it is perceived will be how it's defined.

But in any case, you and I both agree that the problems are worth solving, or at least for me, there's profit in solving them.

No, it goes deeper than that. Imagine a world where everyone could at will summon a forcefield which made it impossible to exert violence to coerce them. Instantly all economic transactions would become voluntary. This would radically change the world from its current state where a large degree of economic transactions involve an element of coercion. Gold and silver have traditionally performed this role in society as an essential check and balance in the political machinery because of their intrinsic value and privacy.

The great Austrian school of economics economist Ludwig von Mises phrased it

Dr. Edwin Vieira, who holds four degrees from Harvard and practices law before the United States Supreme Court phrased it

The State is an organization of force and force is violence. BitCoin strikes directly at the heart of the State which is its ability to use violence to secure resources. Without that ability it becomes irrelevant. Thinking of the State as being irrelevant is like thinking in the 1500's that the Catholic Church would become irrelevant. But that is what BitCoin and tools like it have the potential to do and BitCoin critics rage against that idea because they hate to think that violence can no longer be employed profitably.

I think this is often - and regrettably - overlooked.  Regardless of Satoshi's and the devs vision for Bitcoins, how it is perceived in the real world will define what function it serves and the extent to which it's adopted.  The protocol itself may be neutral but users are not and it's not going to make the transition from being a fringe commodity to a legitimate digital currency without a concerted effort to make that happen.

That said, I think it's easy to forget that from a development perspective Bitcoin is a long term project.  It's in no way critical to the core purpose of the project that people start using Bitcoin as a currency this year, next year, or five years from now - what matters is that people use it in some way between now and when the final block is mined.  

There's a third reason. In the time that bitcoin was all hot and buzzy on sites like Hacker News, a lot of people were annoyed by all the buzz (I know how nerds work, I'm one too ). This made that posting a critical or even bashing article about Bitcoin was a very certain way to get attention and karma. There was even a "blog" from some marketing guy which posted nothing beyond bitcoin-bashing articles.

Then again, it's pretty pointless. The only way to derail bitcoin at this stage is to make (actually implement, test and document) an alternative that not only fixes bitcoins "flaws", but still has the same advantages such as being international and distributed. And then hope the infrastructure such as exchanges etc pick you up, as you'll face exactly the same problems bitcoin did and does.

I'm not neccesarily saying this is not possible, but it takes a lot more than some spin mills and "my first cryptology book"