[waps]

I think the criticism to be read in that is that there really isn't that much economy in bitcoin, and it needs that to survive. The value of bitcoin currently is almost fully speculative, and all articles about it focus on the speculative aspect.

We need a "foreign country" (or something vaguely like it) to actually use bitcoin. Of course it has the problems of all other byzantine protocols : it's not fast, which would be an impediment, and it requires global connectivity. Also, I think the tracking is a mistake. It allows people to see the obvious problems with the distribution of bitcoin.

Imho, bitcoin is a large step forward, and it's close. Very close. But it's centralized dependencies mean it can't resist governments.