Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winning economist, etc.) weighed in on the economics of Bitcoins. Krugman's critique has nothing to do with the technical aspect of how Bitcoin works, instead pointing out that it's a bad monetary design. What's sad is that this would have been trivial to fix. If there were a "BitCoin central bank" that could control the BitCoin monetary supply, they could change the rate at which new currency comes into existence, and that would address Krugman's critique.

From a technical perspective, Bitcoin is modestly clever in how it leverages peer-to-peer computation ("mining") to generate a universal tamper-resistant transaction log, protecting the integrity of the currency against double-spending. As a direct consequence of this, BitCoin is not anonymous.

Yes, you get to receive and send money using a pseudonym of your choosing, but all transactions are public. If Bob the Illegal Stuff Purveyor (BISP) advertised on some web site that his public key was whatever, and you buy something, then you're making a public statement that you're sending some coins to Bob. When the authorities later decide to shut down Bob, they've got a list of all of Bob's customers and can track each and every one of those coins to the point where it entered the BitCoin universe. And when one of those coins goes through an "exchange", where most consumers will trade cash for BitCoins, those exchanges will soon (?) be subject to regular bank regulations, allowing the authorities to make them deanonymize transactions.

As to Bitcoin's history, the inventor goes by a pseudonym. We don't know much about who actually came up with it.

Curiously, Bitcoin documents consider it to be a feature that a Bitcoin transaction is irrevocable. Once you spend money, you can't get it back. What's missing are the sorts of buyer protection you get from credit cards or Paypal. There's no way to say "the merchant didn't deliver the goods; I demand restitution." Or, that's not a feature of Bitcoin. It's instead something you'd have to pursue in the legal system. Good luck with that.

In short, I see Bitcoin as a cute hack, but with a broken economic model, zero consumer protection, and no meaningful anonymity (despite design claims to the contrary), I can't imagine it ever gaining any real traction.