This is the monetarist approach. That does not necessarily mean it’s incorrect, but it’s not founded in praxeology either. Even if you have constant inflation, as the number of users increases, from the perspective of an individual user, the marginal return on investment still decreases. So there is still a reason to call it “unfair”. Furthermore, in the current implementation the block size adjusts only once every four years anyway so there is plenty of time to hop on.
As far as I know, USD is not banned in Poland. In fact I think a lot of Austrians misrepresent the legal tender laws. For a normal businessman, the direct effect of legal tender laws on his trades is largely non-existant, with the exception of countries suffering from hyperinflation, or communist ones, where governments explicitly ban it. If you’re not a bank, you probably do not need to accept USD (or the local tender) in any trade you are conducting. The reason why fiat is regionally distributed is mostly due to indirect influence (e.g. you need to use the local currency as the main one in your bookkeeping, banks often treat it favourably, and various public services require it) and network effects.
I’m not familiar with Poland in particular, but in general in communist countries, you were prohibited from owning a “harder” currency. That did not stop a flourishing black market and high prices for those currencies.
The problem in the US is that the government often attacks producers (rather than users) of competing currencies. But the production of Bitcoin is decentralised, and happens all over the world. So what’s the government going to do? The computer that produces a Bitcoin does not need to store it. It could be stored in a different country. So even if somehow the government would claim that the mining rig is violating its monopoly on mint, confiscating the rig still does not confiscate the Bitcoins.
Think of Bitcoin as bittorrent. It’s just data flowing on the internet. It’s also comparatively smaller amount of data. So how do you stop it? You forbid people from renting servers in other countries, and connecting to services in other countries? Apart from having ridiculous restrictions of the internet, which affect almost all use of it whatsoever, there is no effective way of stopping it. Also, even if they somehow get to you and you get jailed, you can still manage to protect your bitcoins from being expropriated (and leave them to be used by your family, for example). Compare that to gold: government takes the gold and you’re screwed.
You can use it to buy stuff from countries that do not ban bitcoin, and you can trade them on black market. There might be a higher risk, but the market value of Bitcoins would also be higher.
I’m not an expert, so I don’t know to what extent this is correct or not (for a gold-plated tungsten probably yes, but that’s hardly the only way to forge a gold coin). Nevertheless, it diminishes the value of the coin and its usability. Furthermore, there’s the problem of physical contact and speed. If you’re trading remotely or online, it is impractical to cut a coin that is stored somewhere else, so you’d need to substitute gold for a note, or a DGC (digital gold currency), which has its own range of problems.
Unless, of course, someone invents replicators. Then gold would become worth next to nothing.
My point is that there is no praxeological reason to why any specific type of medium of exchange should be dominant. The advantages and disadvantages of them (and therefore their ability to grasp this or that part of the market for medium of exchange) are heterogeneous variables, and their relative importance changes depending on the environment and the state of technological progress. While it’s possible that on a free market, gold would be dominant for the time being, we do not have a free market. Furthermore, gold is much more in danger from government than Bitcoin. Even if they wanted, they can’t do much about it.
