While I've been skeptical about BitCoin here, this is a terrible argument against them. Broadly speaking, there is one market, the global market. Dollars aren't <i>that</i> special, really, they're just one more asset in a pool of millions of different asset types with every imaginable attribute and every imaginable kind of customer. (Yes, they are a bit special, but in the grand scale of things there are <i>all kinds</i> of special assets, like food, water, gold, housing, medical care, professional skills, "when everything is special, nothing much is". Dollars aren't <i>that</i> special.) The only way to carve out a piece of that global economy is to very aggressively build yourself a walled garden. Certain entities do that, like those running MMORPGs with internal currencies, who aggressively prevent people from using MMORPG currency in the real economy (mostly because of the sudden and horrific tax implications if they permitted it to act like true currency). They deliberately make their currencies as useless as possible outside their walled gardens to avoid scrutiny by the IRS. (And they don't do a perfect job. But the walls are usually high enough.)<p>This is not what BitCoin should or can do. It wants to join the pool of millions of different asset types and bring some new and unique characteristics to the party. It can not become a separate economy, because very, very powerful (and completely impersonal) forces drag everything into the global economy. If you try to separate the economies, all you actually do is create arbitrage opportunities, and the act of exploiting those returns the currency to the general market.<p>For BitCoin to remain fully separate basically <i>requires</i> them to be utterly useless as anything but tokens in a video game. The posted argument is complete gibberish.