I was the one who asked him questions at the IHS social.

Basically I said that in every objective measure of a currency's usefulness, bitcoin is superior to gold.  Then he informed me that currencies didn't have objective value, which was sort of funny standing next to to the head of YAL who was an avowed objectivist.

Anyway, I asked why gold was any better than eggs, or shells, or beads, or anything else with the classical notions of concrete tangible value that predated gold and he explained that gold was concentrated and easy to transport.  So I then asked him if being able to load the 1.5 billion value he sold paypal for onto one usb drive rather than the 400 tons of gold he would need to lug around otherwise had objective value.  He kinda dismissed the point and tried to explain how no one used bitcoin and that was its downfall.  I pushed back again pointing out the million or so dollars traded for bitcoins in the last day, the 60,000 GPU's mining bitcoin right now, and the 40,000 or so Silk Road users as all providing fairly stable bootstrapping mechanisms along with the interest in adoption by those in destabilized economies such as Africa.

I then tried to point out other advantages such as being impossible to counterfeit, far more divisible than gold/paper/etc., and soon to be added 2-party escrow/multisig transactions.  I don't think he really grasped the usefulness of each of those factors and I decided to stop pressing the issue so some other kid could ask about what school they should go to or something equally inane.

The whole conference was so encouraging because of raw numbers (over 1000 libertarians) but it was rather sad that it was more about shiny suits than debating ideas.  I would have loved to give a presentation on bitcoins, spectrum property rights, and inevitable deflation of the federal reserve system to spark at least something.  The Stossel taping that will be showing on Thursday was also rather sad, John Bolton was a complete tool and the crowd rightfully booed him, but I'm sure it won't play well on television.