>it's not trolling, he raises many valid points and he's not the first to do it.
Though he has done much fine writing before, I was really disappointed by this post by Charlie Stross. The arguments are weak and poorly supported.
* The whole power consumption debate is based on a single out-of-date estimation at a bitcoin site.
* The Gini Coefficient argument is based on a small survey from 2011 when Bitcoin was new and practially unknown with a tiny userbase of early adopters.
* The point about malware mining is also outdated, and it refers to a problem that is going away fast. 99% of Bitcoin mining is now done with custom ASIC chips, which are vastly better at it than PC CPU/GPU hardware. Using a botnet for mining is becoming more and more pointless every week.
[Botnets can still make a little money mining scrypt-based Litecoin, but that is also become less and less profitable, and ASIC chips are now on their way to that market, too.]
* Many of his opinions about the "evil" of the Bitcoin network are just laughable. The world is evil. Nations go to war and millions die for no good reason. Millions of lives and entire nations are destroyed by the drug trade and the 'war' on drugs. International banks, like HSBC, launder hundreds of billions in drug funds. That is the status quo. In that context, Bitcoin is a tiny drop in a big and toxic ocean.