[icebraining]

One may believe that the current system is not optimal, yet not believe that Bitcoin is improvement.

As for the transactions vs hashes correlation, while technically true, in practice the two are inevitably linked, as the currency must be protected proportionally to the sums it manages. As more value is stored and transacted, so the incentive to attack it increases, and so an increase in the cost of attacking it is required. Though it might trail off at some point, Bitcoin's history has shown this relation to exist.