Here is my response to this guys tweets.
3/ Western Union spends roughly 1/2 of revenue on local offices by both ends of the transactions. Bitcoin remittances don't solve this.
Do we really need an office on both ends just to transmit funds?
4/ Bitcoin presently costs on the order of $6.5k per megabyte of data added to the block chain.
Yes it is true that tx's are pretty expensive (I don't know how accurate your figure is). Currently the majority of that is covered by the mining reward, the user only pays a few cents if anything.
The fact is we REALLY don't need an insanely high hashrate to protect the network. We only need just enough to protect the network. If miners aren't getting paid enough, they will switch off, incresing the revenue for every other miner. We don't need an insanely high hashrate. Yes this is bad for miners but miners should know that Bitcoin mining is very new and has significant risks.
Also if Bitcoin becomes big the transaction fees will cover some of the mining reward. This is what Satoshi predicted would happen.
The other thing is changes to the concensus system could make mining a thing of the past, or less important. I believe that one day we may move to another concensus system (such as a hybrid POW/POS like proof of activity) once another concensus system is well studied, tested, understood and has obvious benefits for Bitcoin. This could significantly change this situation.
Also this factoid isn't very useful. The blockchain is designed to store transaction data, which is typically under 1KB in size. Why don't you ask your bank how much they charge for storing your stuff in their vault
5/ The entire market cap of Bitcoin as of 4/1/2015 is a fee paid to someone for work already done between 2009 and 4/1/2015.
I am kind of confused by this statement. I think you are saying that the market cap of Bitcoin was paid out to miners as a fee over the last couple of years.
Please name me one currency that doesn't pay out it's newly minted currency to someone for work done.
6/ Most advantages of Bitcoin which matter are captured by, and improved upon by, a LAMP app which simply holds account balances.
You are right, depending on what aspects of Bitcoin you see as an advantage. Centralized systems are more efficient. However such a system would end up just like e-gold, libertyreserve, digicash and all the others who tried to make centralized payment systems similar to Bitcoin in the past.
7/ Bitcoin's Internet cheering squad is a spontaneously organized boiler room. This is Bitcoin's #1 engineering and marketing achievement.
I hate some of the pro-Bitcoiners, in particular the ones who think that Bitcoin is some kind of untouchable God or something. Bitcoin has advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses.
9/ Bitcoin is not a protocol in any meaningful sense of word. It is a single C++ codebase that you have to be bug-for-bug compatible with.
This is something that really bugs me. We do need a more defined protocol, but we are getting there. We have BIPS for many things now, which is a good start but we do need better documentation.
10/ Bitcoin's disaster recovery plan is a) get a cabal of people together in IRC, b) shut down the entire payment network, c) sort things.
What are you talking about? This is not the disaster recovery plan and It is not possible for them to shut anything down.
12/ Time between Bitcoin blocks is not guaranteed (follows a Poisson distribution). Sometimes all pending transactions just stop for a while
Why do you think it needs to be guaranteed?
13/ The media following Bitcoin, both enthusiast press and tech rags, are so incompetent at their jobs that it beggars belief.
This is so true and it is such a joke, take for example the Dorian Satoshi incident or the "Bitcoin CEO is dead" reports, however it's not just Bitcoin. The media are so incompetent at their jobs period.
