This is probably one of the best summations of #bitcoin I have ever seen

No. Bitcoin is cryptographic proof that something happened. That 'something' required work. A dollar requires no work to create hence it confers no value as you have wisely pointed out.

You can prove that you spent a certain amount of resource, but what good does that do me? I understand why the supply is constrained, but not why the demand should be nonzero. What can you manufacture out of Bitcoinium? Are Bitcoins good to eat? Why should anyone want the stuff? Moreover, the difficulty of mathematically producing Bitcoin is variable, it's not a fixed cost. If the difficulty is what causes the "product" to have value and the difficulty is variable, shouldn't the value be variable? The challenge of Bitcoiners is not merely to show that Bitcoin does in fact have a price, or that it ought to have a price, but that it ought to have a *particular* price. Should I sell an hour of my labor for 1 BTC or 100 BTC or 0.001 BTC? Why?