(fiat)... inflation is minimal.

Our modern financial system(federal reserve) is a pretty darn amazing invention. Money is never wasted.

Now, we do have quite a bit of economic inequality right now, especially here in the United States, but that is less a factor of the financial system than the political system, and plenty of countries with similar financial systems to ours have more equitable distributions of wealth.

BitCoin alternatives

There are plenty of alternatives to BitCoin.

You can use regular money on your grid by way of PayPal and PayPal Micropayments. These modules are widely available for OpenSim and many hosting companies will set you up for little or no extra cost.

You can use the OMC currency from Virwox — which also supports BitCoin trading, if you want your customers to have the option to use BitCoin in some capacity.

And you can issue your own currency. That has some legal implications as well (see yesterday’s article Virtual Currency 101), and you have to be careful about how your set up your currency, but if you do it right you get to keep all the money you make from selling your currency in addition to providing a fun, low-cost way for your users to spend money in-world.

Hosting companies Dreamland Metaverse and TalentRaspel specialize in setting up custom virtual currencies for private grids — and the Website infrastructure needed to manage them. And the currency modules are also available, if you have the technical skills to set it up on your own.

Don't you find it intriguing that the thing's he she says...

About the Author:
Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has
been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the
Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from
over a dozen countries, including Russia and China.

Clearly, she need an editor herself. Or maybe she's desperate for traffic, no matter how badly written the article is?

Then something sexier comes along — Justin Bieber, say, releases ByteCoin and gives away a free kiss to all users. What is to keep users from selling off their BitCoins and switching to ByteCoins?

...
3. BitCoins are volatile

> Duh, so is every currency. In fact, the past 4 months have been the most stable...ever. Didn't Zimbabwes currency inflate by like 10000% in 2 years?

...

When people stop wanting them, their perceived value will drop through the floor. And, unlike with Beanie Babies, there’s no hope that if you wait long enough they’ll come back into fashion or become historic collectibles.

For an average person her arguments seem legit, and it couldn't be shrugged off as easy as "Ponzi Scheme" argument. I think that for the next year those will be most popular among Bitcoin detractors, not because it's good but because it's something general public understands. I know why she is wrong, but countering her arguments requires analytics and hard numbers, so I am going to play devil's advocate here to see what we can come up with.