Who are these "rules" created and enforced by? Force is the only valid consensus mechanism. If it has no force, it's not actually a rule. There are only two methods of consensus, either using force to make convergence happen, or relying on the aggregate of all actors (aka invisible hand of the market) to form a functioning Schelling point.
Bitcoin was modeled after a war game exercise, and the PoW function mimics this force variable, but it's fake force. Force in the real world always takes precedent over any imaginary, digital force. Bitcoin has built-in middlemen and doesn't remove counter party risk. Transactions are not blinded either. If some govt goons want to come stand in the mining buildings while labeling anyone who doesn't worship them as terrorists and block their transactions, it's not a monetary system, it's a permissioned ledger aka tyranny.
Everything is a set of rules but you may be under the delusion that this isn't the case. Accepting this fact doesn't make me a "statist". Who/what set the rules of the properties of what makes gold gold? how do you know we are not in a computer simulation and someone didn't program the properties of gold to be gold? You are not forced to use bitcoin and you are not forced to use gold. Nobody can change the rules of bitcoin because trying to do so will always result in 2 coins (and you will receive tokens on the other end always).
All that matters is the certainty that:
1) When you wake up, your X amount of BTC will be X amount of BTC
2) The total supply is known (so in the future when huge gold mines are found outside of earth, unlike you or whoever inherits your gold will not have their purchasing power plummet to the ground because gold will be as abundant as seashells, and trust me, when this happens -and it will- whoever holding gold will not give a fuck about how "the total supply of gold is organic"), rules are transparent, nobody can change the fundamentals, nobody is forcing you to use it but you are forced to follow these rules if you want to use it, perpetual incentive to mine it by someone.
Please tell me when was the last time someone changed bitcoin "in his basement by snapping his fingers". Last time I checked, this never happened, also transactions have never been censored and so on. So far it works. Bitcoin is shit? sure, but it's the best we got so far, and yes, it's better than any piece of metal in the 21st century. Gold was great, when cameras and scanners didn't exist.
With such a system, to "be your own bank", you would store the bitcoins yourself, then transfer something like $10k worth at a time to a 3rd party bitcoin debit card service or whatever. In other words, there is virtually ZERO DIFFERENCE compared to being your own banker using silver or gold because you can do the exact same thing there: store metals in your own safe/vault, and transfer $10k at a time to a debit card service when you want to spend.
Lol at zero difference. The difference is you could put a $billion worth of BTC in an USB encrypted or you could just email yourself the wallet file in an encrypted file which is perfectly fine to do temporarily to not carry anything while you take a flight. Also you could digitally hide it for plausible deniability, meanwhile anyone with a $5 wrench could force you to open your vault or else he'll fuck you up, and im sure you value your life above your gold.
With gold you are stuck where you are forever, with no chances for plausible deniability if your vault is found. For this reason alone, BTC is better than useless gold. No matter how shit Bitcoin can be, nobody gives a fuck about gold in 2018. Until someone can fix what makes Bitcoin shit, there's no point in selling it for metals.
He keeps repeating the same garbage. People like him are the sheep in the markets that get slaughtered they do not know innovation if it slapped them in the face. Theres no point in continuing his banter since we know its baseless. Ive already showed him how bitcoin is the bottom of the new exters pyramid and thus serves backbone of all speculative assets. It is 100x better than gold and fiat is even 2x better than gold. Some people will never get it cause financially they are hedging against it.