Agreed. I've seen very few Bitcoin skeptics who have demonstrated deep technical understanding of Bitcoin and it's potential beyond a simple currency. If they exist I'd love to hear about them.
And I've seen likewise from Bitcoin proponents. As far as I can tell, “Belief in Bitcoins” is the technolibertarian equivalent of “disbelief in evolution”.
I can see plenty of good arguments for non-physical currency. Bitcoin seems to combine the downsides of the Gold Standard and the Euro, though. Deflationary currency is a bad idea. Giving up control of one's currency is a bad idea.
Oh I agree most Bitcoin proponents don't have a good understanding. Don't listen to them either. But I can point to several who do understand it extremely well (e.x. Andreas Antonopoulos https://twitter.com/aantonop is one, Chris Dixon seems to be another)
I'm such a person. I've been active with BTC, I've mined and traded (both to a nice personal profit), but I think BTC is a loser. I invested in BTC the same way I invested in one-hit wonders like Zynga: very temporarily.
Perhaps we can ask each other some questions:
My first question: BTC is designed with very limited bandwidth for transactions (right now it can only do 7 transactions per second). Is there an actual solution in place to deal with this? All I ever see is hand-waving about how the limits could be raised or eliminated, though that appears that it would create a problem with block chain size and bandwidth.
Is there a proposal someplace that actually addresses BTC's current lack of capacity that doesn't just create a rather massive bandwidth and storage problem?
This also has the advantage of instant and micro transactions with minimal fees, while retaining most of the properties of Bitcoin itself (decentralized, trustless, irreversible)
If I read the pertaining article correctly then the tps issue is solvable within the practical bounds of the internet, bitcoin development, home connections and bitcoin use cases. For proposals to solve this read: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability - I personally wouldn't consider this a show stopper. Are there specific reasons why you think it might?
If I'm understanding that correctly, every node would experience peak traffic of around 50mbps, and constant traffic of at least 10mpbs. It's not clear to me what happens when you have nodes that lag (and that would certainly be a common occurrence at those levels of traffic).
Beyond that, I found their choice of reference level of traffic oddly low given the stated ambitions of most serious BTC proponents.