Fortunately, we have a control experiment for this, when Suggester made many of the same arguments being made today on Feb 18, 2010:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=57.msg390#msg390. I think his logic was reasonably sound, if not perfect, and many of the things he said have since come through (e.g., speculation and bubble/bust being the main thing driving interest and transactions for Bitcoin).
On a similar note to what CurbsideProphet is doing, I kindly asked the guy that actually runs bitcoinworldmarket.com if he could do a service to the community and tell us on a daily basis what his actual sales volume is (
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=28276.msg357205#msg357205). His original post expressed his concern about loans not being viable for Bitcoin (or any long-term deflationary scenario) and how this would choke business growth (for the record, my posts make it clear which side of that debate I take). He hasn't taken me up on this, but I wish some other serious merchants would (e.g. spendbitcoins.com). We can argue all day long about "YES YES YES Bitcoin will take over the world" or "NO NO NO it will crash and burn", but there's nothing like actual data to settle these questions.
The
'bubble' aspect will be proven or disproven by the end of August,
( ref: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=26117.0 ). As far as the success of a statistically insignificant sample of one, I think all we're learning here is variance. The main point being is bitcoin has quite a bit to go before there are large network-effect increases.
I think this is the basis for many who defend bitcoin, myself included, because we know the potential exists - using an argument that it has already failed due to its relative immaturity is ludicrous. It would be like criticizing an infant for not knowing how to drive a car.
We'll get there, but expectations must be governed by the time needed to do so.