That's a great read. What's striking, in his description of the conference, is the total lack of any connection to real world activity. None of these people seem to be trying to get enough Bitcoin together to build a steel mill or a wafer fab or a smartphone factory or, indeed, any kind of startup that does something. Bitcoin is expected to somehow generate wealth without actually doing anything that generates revenu…
As it turns out, moving money from one group to another† is pretty useful in modern society. It's really all that money is good for, after all. Some of my comments from the last week and a half about what Bitcoin is good for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30469595 when your country's central bank suspends electronic cash transfers, suspends the foreign exchange market, limits cash withdrawals, and prohibits th…
And I say that as someone who has literally spent hundreds of bitcoin at one of the ONLY points in bitcoin's history when it was primarily used as a genuine medium of exchange (silk road).
Simple example - show me a method of handling reconciliation of fraud/contract dispute for bitcoin that doesn't fall back on the legal systems of those government systems you're so happy to rail against. (hint - there is NONE).
You know what those governments absolutely won't do? Incur costs upon themselves to mediate exchanges in a foreign currency. They will either ban it (china) or add back all those things you seem to think bitcoin will solve (funds freezing, required intermediaries, identity & reporting, sanctions) that make those costs predictable and acceptable (us).