Quote from: ipnone5only on July 21, 2014, 05:55:32 AM

And you'll find that bitcoin is all kinds of worse than gold ever was, easy to hide, easy to transport, easy to assay, hard to regulate, global in nature.

What you'll actually find is that it's a law enforcement officer's dream. On a small level: yes, it requires no centralized point, and that's great if you want to transport value stores without regulation. The problem is that centralization is required for general purpose use. As soon as you have that, you have KYC laws coming into effect (check out the proposed BTC regulation in NY State from earlier this week). KYC laws + public ledger = much much much better than gold for LEOs (edit: or cash, frankly).