The question isn't "Is BitCoin's value non-zero?" As a general critic, I freely say up front, yes, it's interesting and has some non-zero value. I won't even say I'm "admitting" it, because it was never my contention otherwise. But merely establishing that there is some aspect with a non-zero value isn't interesting. The question is, do the positives outweigh the negatives, and if so, do they outweigh them enough to fulfill the stated goals?
You can make anything look great by considering only the positives, you can make anything look terrible by only considering the negatives. The question at hand is about the balance, not whether BitCoin has any positives at all.
I think you're confusing the Bitcoins' value with the value provided by the open source code implementation which has been open sourced.
The code can be forked and used to power another coin system, let's call it Webcoin, which will have the same properties. The cryptographic, decentralized and uniqueness properties are therefore a value of the code.
The value of Bitcoin is related to this specific implementation, i.e. the marketing that caused people to put their money in this specific fork of the code and permitted early adopters to cash in.
At some point in the future, a country might choose to use the code to power its own currency system and to back it with the economic activity performed within (which is taxed via taxation). That would give intrinsic value to the coins; today Bitcoins is just marketing implemented on top of a well-written open source decentralized code-base.
"I think you're confusing the Bitcoins' value with the value provided by the open source code implementation which has been open sourced."
No... no, I don't think so. You seem to be using "value" as a synonym for "property", which is not at all how I meant it. I meant it as, errr, value. Both the code and the BitCoin network have positive entries on their value balance sheets, but I don't know that their total is positive, or that it will be positive enough to work.
There's also the block chain. Bitcoin is currently secured by a rather large amount of computing power, which makes it hard to double-spend. Any competing system would have to match this, which might be difficult unless you could somehow tempt miners away from Bitcoin.
Fully agree with your sentiment. Not trying to argue Bitcoin will succeed.
But it's very clear that it is interesting. It essentially solved globally consistent distributed naming and non-web-of-trust PKI on the side, and almost no one noticed.
I would say it sovled* gobally consistent distributed naming.
Where the asterisk means that it has not yet stood the test of time. It seems like a solution, but none of us should be quite sure yet that it actually works as advertised.
You can make anything look great by considering only the positives, you can make anything look terrible by only considering the negatives. The question at hand is about the balance, not whether BitCoin has any positives at all.