Quote from: Vandroiy on February 09, 2014, 06:08:29 PM

The OP is correct but missing one detail.

In a world where finance isn't regulated to death, you don't need Bitcoin. Just pick a bank and use it to convert commodities into whatever asset you need to pay with, or vice versa. Bitcoin's only real use is to combat red tape. Without this, it's easily beaten by many other systems, for example a payment processor plus gold exchanges.

That's not to say Bitcoin is a bad idea. It may or may not be a decent weapon against man-made idiocy; time will tell.

Oh absolutely, I am not denying that, BTC success is due to Gresham's law, no doubt about it. A Liberty Reserve type system would beat BTC if it wasn't for the vulnerability.

This is not tinfoil hat stuff, Alan Greenspan himself wrote this:

http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

Just that there are a lot more risks than inflation nowadays.