"Goldbugs are by their nature defeatist and pessimistic; get enough of them together at the same time and they become self-fulfilling. (That’s why they tend to be so evangelical about their beliefs.)"Point 1: Confirmation bias is too easy to fall for, that I, for one, am constantly looking out for it. It's why Republicans thought that Mitt Romney was on his way towards a presidential win, but more critically, it's why so many people think that the 2009 economic stimulus failed.
Point 2: As Matthew Yglesias noted this past weekend, if there is inflation, everything goes up, not just gold.
Point 3: By the way, if you click through to the BBC link talking about the current amount of gold in the world, you'll notice that the BBC specifically qualifies their figures, based on gold that is "above ground". And if you click through to their link to the USGS' below-ground reserves estimates, another 24% is still underground. But that's only based on current extraction technology; as you've seen with shale oil and tar sands, as prices go up, newer, more exotic (and therefore more expensive) technologies are employed, and eventually the scale of known reserves goes up. The classic definition of "inflation", is an increase in the supply of money.
Point 4: Unlike gold, and its yet undiscovered, underground reserves, Bitcoin is capped, period. That might seem like a reason to believe that it is a true hedge against inflation, but you have to convert it to a sovereign currency. If it were possible to avoid conversion, instead of inflation now you're faced with the problems of massive deflation, as people horde it as an investment. The classic definition of "deflation", is a decrease in the supply of money.
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