PoW mining currently transfers $500 million USD worth of wealth out of the Bitcoin eco-system, into the pockets of pools/miners/asic hardware vendor/electricity company.
This wealth transfer will go on, perpetually, as long as PoW mining exists. Because, as long as Bitcoin relies on PoW mining to secure the network, the expense will exist, and it can
not be cheap (otherwise attack on the network will be cheap and easy too).
In order for Bitcoin price to rise, there has to be at least more than $500 million of new money to enter the eco-system, every year, just to maintain the current price.
All Bitcoin holders are essentially charged a 10% tax per year, perpetually, by the PoW mining network. How can this be sustainable?
Excellent post and I think you know the answer. Bitcoin is not "free". Seigniorage (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage) is, as you say, 10% a year. So do the math: in 7 years the stock of money in Bitcoin will be halved, unless, as you say, new money comes in. But new money is getting harder to find. I myself--a Bitcoin long who has two Bitcoin exchange accounts, one in the USA, one in the UK--have yet to buy any Bitcoin because the transactions have been canceled (coinbase.com) or slow in arriving. I may drop out of Bitcoin if I don't get bitcoin soon. And it took me 44 hours to install Armory, my PC wallet, and I am told that is not unusual. Only 7000 full Bitcoin nodes exist--a tiny number that makes the Bitcoin P2P network very fragile. Further, the chief scientist Gavin A. has stated himself he sees a day when users get charged for using the P2P network, and already as you know there is a minimum recommended transaction fee for every bitcoin send. Further G.A. has said anonymity may not always be the same as today in future versions of the Bitcoin P2P network, which will make this network less attractive to the principle people who use bitcoin and don't just horde it for speculation, and that would be black marketeers.
In short, Bitcoin is a bit of a Ponzi scheme for black marketeers working in the dark market. And, as others have pointed out, the transaction fees in established payment schemes that use fiat currencies, like PayPal, like Western Union, and the like, while high, at least have the advantage of being transparent. In Bitcoin, these fees are hidden. Bitcoin is not free of transaction costs, is not anonymous, depends on a fragile P2P network, and is hard to convert to and from fiat currencies.