I don't particularly. But I think that unless government collapses completely and we're back to the barter system, it will be used for exchange. People are programmed to accept money. I really can't think of anything that's practical and nearly 100% believable with verifiable value except for old silver dollars.
Jon Paulos, a very readable mathematician, wrote about a scheme to create money. That would that when expressing money in decimal form, the value has to be cut off at some point, assume it's at thousandths. All of those cut-off miniscule amounts add up. Programmed by someone very devious and tech savy, could sweep those cut off decimals and accumulate it into an account. It would add up very quickly. I think a scheme along these lines is what started the mutual fund crisis at Putnam.
Could the bitcoin algorithm be something like that?
"The numbers man" John Paulos is very good, as was Martin Gardner (and Yakov Perelman before them).
Bitcoin (based on "nothing" you can hold in your hand but can hold and transfer in cyberspace) is the antithesis of the "gold standard" (based on "something" you can hold in your hand but can't transfer in cyberspace) so most "gold bugs" will hate it just on that basis. Which is kind of interesting because, as a finite (and possibly diminishing, due to losses) resource (somewhat similar to gold, including the "mining" reference) the price inflation of the currency "value" is inherent, built in.
But how and, more importantly, when would you like to use "currency" that, within a span of a few days or even hours can double in "value" (relative to most accepted convertible currencies) as well as be cut in half of its "value," i.e., you become a currency speculator and arbitrageur, whether you want it or not. Would you hoard it or spend it? If you are a shop accepting bitcoins, how often would you keep repricing the items based on extremely volatile currency?
Remember the Linden Labs and Second Life's LindenDollars and collapse of the Ginko Financial Bank?
Not to mention that due to the inherent characteristics of cyberspace and distribution of bitcoins, the entire supply of bitcoin is far more susceptible to attacks and/or theft or control change than more than a fraction of the entire distributed world supply of gold in existence.
The Auric Goldfingers and Hunt brothers of cyberspace are already licking their chops over cornering the bitcoin market : Bitcoin Is Broken :: Hacking, Distributed. Tulips, at least, were impervious to this kind of subterfuge, though the barriers to entry into the "tulips market" were kind of low and tulip seeds were sold as an "investment" rather than "money" though anybody could use them as currency.
Heck, how long do you think it would take the NSA or for that matter, any entity with massive parallel/distributed computing power and crypto algo expertise (Google, IBM, etc.) to take over Bitcoin?