[gwern]

Your economic points seem to be just reiterating the claim 'currencies must have a backing!', which is something people can disagree on and not relevant to the essay. (If some random country adopted Bitcoin as its currency, would it suddenly cease to be Worse is Better and just be Better is Better? Or vice versa? If not, then the tough economics/philosophy question of whether a currency needs backing to be a 'currency' is not relevant.)

> To all that, add the critiques you sourced of Bitcoin; that while it has impressive virality, it largely fails at its security goal by making the cost to defend transaction integrity greater than the cost of attacking it; that it largely fails at its anonymity goal by requiring a complete audit log be made available to everyone simply in order to function; that it largely fails at its decentralization goal by requiring resources comparable to that of a Visa or a Mastercard just to scale.

It's true that the cost of defense is similar to attack, the audit log is public, and the scaling story is not good. But does it fail? That's the question, and so far it seems to bumble along, with all the major problems being in things surrounding Bitcoin (MtGox, MyBitcoin, that Polish exchange) but not actually Bitcoin. Bitcoin fails on a lot of properties, but it's still there. Unix failed at a lot of things too, but somehow it's still around.

That's kind of the essence of Worse is Better - maybe those security properties or software properties are not as important and valuable as people judging the elegance thought that they were.