I'm John Nagle...
So what's wrong in the Bitcoin world?
First, it...screams "bubble" to anyone who's seen one. Bear in mind that the Bitcoin system generates no revenue. All funds must come from new investors.
Bitcoin is not a company or a stock so it never will "generate revenue" and will always fall short (for you) in this respect.
Second, Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, but it's actually a speculative vehicle. If Bitcoin were a successful currency, there would be many merchants using it for small transactions, with perhaps some speculation on the side. In practice, the speculation dominates. This is the real problem with Bitcoin.
You are correct. The excitement in this teeny, tiny micro-community is due to the anticipation of bitcoin's use as a currency. There is risk in speculating that it will be adopted as a currency but there could be huge payoff too! Your criticisms of bitcoin seem based more on analyzing charts than on appreciating its fundamentals.
Bitcoin is the first of its kind.
If you read
this very good article you will learn that "Bitcoin isn't just a currency but an elegant universal solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem[1], one of the core problems of reaching consensus in Distributed Systems." The "useless work" of mining (solving computations) is actually at the core of what enables bitcoin to "live out on the network" and maintain the fidelity of its ledger. It is a prototype of many decentralized applications that will now be forthcoming.
Bitcoin is (in theory) beyond the control of governments, so it can't be manipulated and inflated or killed by them. Unlike your other examples it is decentralized (as mentioned), and it is (or can be) private so it can move across police state or capital-controlled borders.
Those are some of its technical points, but there is a certain morality at play here too. The invention of bitcoin is the response of humanity to the economic system that we were born into and which we now understand oppresses us and always has. A tiny financial class benefits enormously from the present system and seems to be so arrogant that they no longer attempt to hide their thefts from us, their victims. Something simply has to be done. So, you can be "amused" watching us little people struggle but what kind of man are you? What are
you doing to right the wrongs of this parasitic class? Is the morality of an investment something you consider for your clients or do you have them invested in oil companies, Monsanto, uranium miners, defense companies, etc.?