Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else’s computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.

<< So does every type of software people want....especially entertainment, games and porn. It's hardly a reason to avoid a potentially transformative and disruptive new currency.

Bitcoin violates Gresham’s law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining. (So the greatest benefits accrue to the most ruthless criminals.)

<< Total nonsense. Electricity? Seriously? Computer companies use a lot of electricity - should we shut them down? The military wastes more electricity than anyone - if that's an issue the author can be a peace activist - but it doesn't have bearing on Bitcoin. Also, there is no proof whatsoever that a significant portion of power is stolen. The large miners....in fact any miners of significance are huge companies who legitimately pay for electricity. There are also areas of the word like Iceland with nearly free power costs. This allegation is a lot like someone in 1991 arguing against the World Wide Web because they feel it will be dominated by people who steal phone services.

Bitcoin’s utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination (and drugs and child pornography).

<< Cash has been regulated for centuries....how's that doing at cutting down on crime? The claim that Bitcoin is used as a major crime vehicle just isn't true. The entire market cap of Bitcoin is less than a days international drug trade. The largest money launderers are the massive banks. Just this month HSBC was charged for laundering more money than the entire amount of Bitcoin. This is a BS claim made by people who feel Bitcoin is a threat.

It’s also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society. You think our wonderful investment bankers aren’t paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion.

<< This guy is the gift that keeps on giving. Now we come to the root of his issue: concern that people will not give all their requested earnings to the state. He wants men with guns to outlaw the speaking of certain numbers because of the off chance it might interfere with their ability to pay for war, spying and prisons. He's also lying, Bitcoin was not, by any means "designed" for tax evasion - it was designed to cryptographically verify transactions without need for a central ledger.

Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia, and the “if this goes on” linear extrapolations imply that BtC will badly damage stable governance, not to mention redistributive taxation systems and social security/pension nets if its value continues to soar (as it seems designed to do due to its deflationary properties).

<< Its a new, emerging technology, of course the Gini coefficient is large.

To editorialize briefly, BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to

<< Now he's directly quoting Paul Krugman, the man who never met a tax, microphone or bank bailout bonus he didn't like and who predicted in 1997 that the internet would have no more economic impact than the fax machine.

damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Which is fine if you’re a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).

<< Not close to true. To editorialize briefly, this author is a statist fan of big government and violence who is so enamored with the status quo that he has a deep seeded fear of anything new which might upset it to the point that he grasps at the weakest of straws.

-Bruce Fenton