1) the supposed transparency of bitcoins is not a parallel to gold. I say supposed because very few of the users will understand it.
I am a programmer and have a pretty good understanding of cryptography and I reckon the system is sound, I am not an expert but much bigger brains than mine have failed to find a problem with it. It is open source and secure from what I can tell. If there are problems with it, I don't think they are technical.
2) money supply growth is not the sole or possibly even main cause of inflation. This is one of the few lessons of Thatchernomics (unfortunately for Thatcher and her Treasurers, who thought it was).
It is a very solid reason for inflation of currencies, few things devalue a currency more than diluting it. I would be very interested to hear what you think is the true cause of inflation? This is by its design a deflationary currency. It has 8 decimal places to play with so people can easily deal with milli-bitcoins in the future and there are more than enough to represent the smallest subdivision even the smallest fraction of the planetary wealth.
The main cause of Inflation is money creation, but as per the OP, I am looking forward to the disussion that proves me wrong.
3) gold is overhyped as a means of exchange and saying that bitcoins have a parallel in gold is not a good thing.
It is in many repects better than gold. It can be backed up, it is easy to store and move in bulk. We know there is a finite supply of them whereas one day we could find a seam of vast seam of gold and crash the market.
Bitcoins are the ultimate liquid currency, you could if you were so motivated, memorise your currency and transmit it by morse code.
The bitcoin project and the current retail goldshillers are keying into a wave of FUD about "fiat money", the gold standard, federal/global government, survivalism, Tea Party, Trutherism and conspiracy theory generally.
FUD about fiat money is all well and good but centrally controlled currency does have serious problems. It's supply is controlled by central banks who often have far more vested interests than the public good (bombing in Libya anyone?), interest rates are distorted, hyperinflation has happened in countless spots around the world, our purchases are tracked online because we have no means for instant anonymous transactions.
My big problem is inflation though, it is basically theft, the government and central banks can devalue the cash in our pocket at whatever rate they like. You can't put cash in a mattress because it will end up worth less than the mattress. You can opt for a decent interest account but our lovely central banks control the interest rates too so they decide if you can have your cash or whether they need for yet another misadventure benefitting only a select few.
The top 1% have a massively disproportionate amount of the cash, more than enough to feed and clothe the world over, if we were to find a medium for exchange that was not distorted by vested interests, everything would change.
4) the central problem with bitcoins: it's a solution looking for a problem. it's interesting technology but it's not actually solving a dilemma for anyone because generic money does a pretty job job of being useful, transferable, acceptable etc.
Okay, imagine you live in Zimbabwe (or any of the other dozens of countries that have suffered currency collapse in the last few decades), you have no access to dollars, you can see it coming and you have to watch your savings evaporate because that has been the only option you have had.
Now imagine that you could transfer all of your savings into an anonymous, secure, instant, irreversible crypto-currency with a real world value that you can carry across a border on a USB stick.
Bitcoin wont take off here to start with, but as the value of such a commodity becomes clear it is going to take off like wildfire around the world. The governments of the world will have to turn off the internet to stop it.
