* Centralization of mining seems inevitable.
As mining matures it is becoming decentralized. organofcorti stats shows this clearly.
Last times I checked the distribution was variable but generally concentrated, 4-5 companies owning 51% of the hashpower. And they are now all Chinese.
* There is no mechanism to stabilize the value.
Yes there is: more widespread adoption, the plateau of market penetration at the top of the S-curve. It's value will be very stable then, more so than the DXY which has screamed from 80 to 100 in a short time and that measures multi-trillion$ of value.
That is not a "mechanism" but only a "hope". Currently the price is almost entirely (90% or more) set by speculation, ad that is the mais reason for the high volatility. If the price increases to 1000 $/BTC and beyond, that situation would only get worse.
* Limited supply leads to expectations of high value which leads to hoarding instead of use.
Hearding is good, investing is good, saving is good. Only inflationistas dream otherwise.
Is there any example of a deflationary currency that has succeeded?
* Block reward leads to a hyperdeveloped mining industry supported by investors rather than by users.
As before, investors are good. How many people mine their own raw materials for products they use?
You miss the point. The money that new investors are putting into the system goes to the miners' pockets and to pay their bills. Like if a 100 dollar bill cost 100 dollars to print. Or if all the money that investors put into Apple stocks were spent to print super-unforgeable stock certificates, instead of factories and stores.
Moreover the people who use the system (by issuing transactions) have the illusion that the service is free, because the real costs are being paid by those new investors. That is not a sane free market.
* For most people, irreversibility is a serious defect, not a feature.
Cash and gold is irreversible. This is a good feature of sound money.
Note, "for most people".
(And cash and gold are not as irreversible as bitcoin. They require physical presence, so the police has a better chance at recovering stolen cash or gold than of recovering stolen bitcoins.)
* Risk of theft is too high for people who are not computer experts.
Early days in a new technology. Wallet software has improved massively, still a way to go, but in 10 years, very safe to own bitcoins.
We'll see. Bitstamp was recently hacked, BCI relased broken code to their clients...
Perhaps a million people have a reasonable understanding of bitcoin and believe in its eventual succeess. Probably millions of people also have a reasonable understanding of bitcoin but do not believe in its eventual success. The other 7000 million either haven't heard of it, or have heard of it but don't care to know more, or know just enough to dismiss it.
Handwaving. Only a few people understand the software in detail. The rest have to just see that it works: like smartphones, like quantum mechanics, like stem-cell treatment, like meteorology, etc etc etc. In case you haven't noticed a major feature of modern civilization is
extreme specialization. No one person can understand more than a fraction of everything.
It is not just hand-waving. There must be millions of computer scientists who can read Satoshi's whitepaper with no difficulty, and can understand the essential priciples of the protocol, even without reading the source code. However, not all computer scientists believe in bitcoin. In fact, based on the limited sample I have, there must be far more non-believers than believers among the computer scientists.
