Shesh. A Bitcoin has no inherent value. If such incidents become common enough, nobody will be willing to buy bitcoins for dollars or accept bitcoins as payments for goods,which means that the thieves will sit on a bunch of useless bits.
No, that would only be true if people were forced to store their bitcoins on vulnerable bitcoin exchanges, which they're not.
Thus, on this basis, like all useable physical goods, gold has some inherent value as a commodity.
1. Bitcoins can't be counterfeited. If you receive them with even just a few confirmations on the blockchain, it's probably going to be there forever.
2. You can confirm the legitimacy of Bitcoins, en masse, without any cost.
3. You can store bitcoins without any cost.
4. Bitcoins are much easier to transfer to other people.
5. You can form contracts and advanced redemption conditions for transferred coins.
If Bitcoin had no "inherent value" then it should be worthless. Maybe Mises Regression Theorem is wrong?
Bitcoin can be worthless and yet hard to counterfeit; I can sign a random number right now and it's worth nothing. I can Tweet that number or create a permanent record in any number of other ways.
Your second point is the same as your first; it again presumes that there is some value to bitcoin.
I can store a lot of things without meaningful cost. That doesn't make them valuable. My application server with seven gigs of dev logs isn't a treasure trove either, despite the ease with which I managed the data relative to bars of gold.
Bitcoins are easier to transfer than gold coins. That is true. But spent facial tissue is also easier to transfer than gold.
You can form contracts with all manner of instruments, from cows to gravel to pork bellies. Every commodities trader in Chicago has a story about a friend of a friend who ended up with a garage full of pork when they failed to sell a futures contract in time.
I don't know the answer, but I can tell you it's miniscule.
Do you really mean to say gold's rust-resistant properties are to blame for it's exceedingly high price on the market?
Fact: In 2013, Bitcoin is the world's easiest way to send a standardized indicator of wealth from one person to another. Forget anonymity, forget open source, forget deflation, forget amateurs building Ruby on Rails websites poorly!
Bitcoin's #1 benefit is the ousting of intermediaries. Because Bitcoin transactions can occur directly between two people without any third party involvement, the platform upon which people trade Bitcoin for goods and services becomes irrelevant. With Bitcoin, the platform only matters to the extent it aids in the market discovery process.
I for one see inherent value in a currency I have control over 24/7, that I can literally park in my brain never to touch the public Internet, carry with me everywhere I go, send to anyone, anywhere at any time, instantly and without an intermediary. If you see no value in that, honestly, what is there to say. Good luck with your financial goals in 2013.