We don't have to believe everyone is bad or even that the majority isn't very good (this majority lived happily for thousands of years with slavery, in Rome went to the Coliseum to watch people being slew, studies show that the majority of us can still torture under orders to do it, etc.) to predict a world of chaos. 20% mean and armed are enough.

Power never disappear it just shift from some hands to others. I don't like power, including political power, but I dislike even more private power.

Without government, armed bands would take not half of what you have, but probably much more.

Some think they could organize and resist. Those organized groups would probably be very oppressive to their members, especially new members. And their resistance would endure only until faced with a stronger band. Anarchism promises insecurity, economic and trade collapse, end of scientific development, etc. It's that the situation we see in failed states. Somalia is the perfect example.

We could keep the State, but give large powers to small communities, like in Switzerland. There people assemble and rule their matters directly together, including social support, health care, decide regulations on social life, etc. So, basically, our neighbors would have a lot of power over us. Spying and controlling other people's life is a way of living there. No, thank you, I prefer an abstract, distant, power.

Changed the wording of this paragraph to make it more clear, even if the reasoning is still the same.

The goal was to write the minimum possible, without affecting the intelligibility of the ideas.

I'm afraid perceptions on the price being "overbought" will never disappear.

The ECB negative rate it's also an incentive for banks to lend money to each other. In Europe, there are still some banks that don't trust others, so the ECB is forcing them to remove their money from their ECB accounts and start to lend it to other banks more willing to lend it to individuals and corporations.

They lore people to open unverified accounts, then on fake pretexts freeze the account and start blackmailing the owner to give personal information or endure having their funds frozen for 3 months.

After that time, you still can't withdraw unless you are willing to give them your bank account information.

Delenda est Paypal.

Don't forget that the US isn't the world.

In many countries, you can't buy anything with bitcoin. You might even have a hard time or have to pay heavy fees to find someone willing to exchange bitcoins for the local money.

Calling the present situation as mainstream seems very far-fetching.

I know many bitcoiners have an anarchist/libertarian perspective of the world, therefore, they look at the government as a bad thing.

But the creation of a government controlled by the people is one of the most important political inventions of humankind. We managed to tamed the most powerful institution on Earth: the Leviathan of Hobbes. If the government would disappear tomorrow, I think we know what would happen: most streets would be controlled by violent groups. We would living on a brutal feudalistic system in no time.

The state has important functions on stimulating the economy on depressions and social functions supporting the poor that seem to be unviable or hard to execute on a monetary system where money is finite and it's in the hands of a group of pioneers (our hands).

Take the creation of the money from the hands of a democratic government (I know in many countries that power isn't in the hands of democrats), make it finite, and in the hands of a group of pioneers, and rest assure that justice won't be served.

But my text isn't about justice. There is little that we can do. I certainly won't try to convince governments to destroy bitcoin. They will have to do their home work. It's only about taking conscience of what might happen.

Be careful with what you want, because it might come true.

In that notion, "dominated by" means that the bad money will be the one everyone will be given away, so it will be the most transacted one. Because the good money will be hoarded. So, if you received payments in fiat and bitcoin, you will keep bitcoin and use fiat to buy things. Of course, that will make the exchange rate of fiat go down (devaluate) and the one of bitcoin to go up. We already are seeing this phenomena. It's this that is justifying the rise in price of bitcoin.

No, I think all good faith posts are welcome here, including yours.

One could admire the Jewish people and be against this terrible policy of their government. One thing doesn't have nothing to do with the other.

If bitcoin ever goes mainstream it will surely ruin the lifes of all the ones invested in fiat (see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=180798.0). Gresham's Law will destroy their fiat savings, since everyone will want the stronger bitcoin and will dump fiat, devaluating it. We'll see it happen first in the troubled economies, with high inflation and generalized suspicion on governmental money because of past problems.

And I have little doubt that bitcoin won't bring any equality, on the contrary. It will make us bitcoiners rich, but it will be at the expenses of fiat holders.

Because I doubt bitcoin will bring much prosperity, since it will establish a deflationary monetary system.
At best, Bitcoin will have a fixed amount. In reality, there will be a progressive lower amount of bitcoins, since many people will lose access to their bitcoins, because of lost passwords or hardware problems. But the economy will be growing, so that will push the value of each bitcoin higher. Thus, it will create deflation in bitcoin terms. Deflation is very damaging to the economy.

But maybe it will be possible to minimize those deflationary effects:

a) Commercial banks will adopt a bitcoin fractional reserve system, lending bitcoins with only partial support on their holdings. That will allow an artificial (banking) expansion of the amount of bitcoins, thanks to the so-called banking money multiplier.
But since it will be hard to keep a trustworthy insurance of deposits (the government won't have enough bitcoins for that and can't create them), the system will be much more susceptible to runs.
And the interest will have to be high, because most people will prefer to have the bitcoins in their own wallets. So, forget about low interest rates. Well, high real interest rates (aggravated by potential deflation) can ruin any economy, since they thwart many productive investment based on credit.

b) It also might be created a bitcoin pattern, with governments printing money freely convertible in bitcoins. But I can see already the runs on the government on times of crises.

How will the central bank in depressions stimulate the economy?
It won't be possible to do any quantitative easing. Borrowing bitcoins to lend them at cheaper interest rates to the commercial banks won't be cheap.

How will the Government control massive tax evasion, especially if the anonymity of bitcoin improves?  
They will find a way, nothing has destroyed the State in more than 13 thousand years of hierarchical societies. Bitcoin won't be able to do it. It seems we will be subject to intense control of our use of the Internet in order to track our earnings and spending of bitcoins. Some we'll be able to evade it. But the majority won't.

Will the volatility of bitcoin ever end?
The increase of its users will keep bitcoin's price going up. However, because supply and demand is controlled by human perceptions and emotions, after a huge boom in price it will always come a bust. Every overshooting of the price will be followed by a general perception that the price increased too fast and, consequently, by a drop.
For volatility to end, it would be necessary a general adoption of bitcoin that would limit in percentual terms further increases of new users taking in account the already large numbers of users. Currently, since the number of users is relatively low, it's easy to see its numbers increase for more than 30% in a short period. But since the numbers of bitcoin are limited (and the current rate of increase is relatively small and it will be again limited in 2016), the ending of volatility would also require or a stagnant GDP or a fractional reserve system based on bitcoin that would allow its banking numbers to artificially increase side by side with GDP. That won't happen for years. Volatility is here to stay for long.

Will this scenario be the future?
It's impossible to say. But bitcoin seems to have already a too strong standing to fade away on it own.
Another better alt coin might be a stronger obstacle than fiat. But bitcoin can always adopt any improvements.

Can governments still destroy it?
An international coordinated effort against the main exchanges and sites could indeed hurt heavily bitcoin. Even our own wallets are susceptible to attacks by virus/worms (remember Stuxnet?) and the network can also be affected. Access to it can be blocked by ISPs at governmental command. Many could evade these blocks, but the major part of the bitcoiners would give up, taking in account also the risk of sanctions. That indeed would spook major investors.
This can still happen and it will happen on troubled economies. The outcome is anyone's guess, it would depend on governmental coordination and level of effort. Governments lost similar wars (drugs, alcohol, prostitution), but bitcoin is an easier target than these activities. It's not a surprise that, besides scams, governmental repression has been the main negative driver of price.

What would be the consequences of this massive adoption over the price?
I can't even imagine what would be the price of bitcoin. Forget about all the low previsions you read before.


But the genie is out of the bottle. There is nothing we can do, except tell about it.


added 14 March 2015:

What is bitcoin going mainstream?

One can use different criteria.

1) A percentage of the amount of the total expenses on one year. But even 1% would be huge and would imply a very high price for bitcoin. However, according to the mentioned Gresham's Law, bitcoin will be hoarded and only rarely spent. It's like gold. Gold is part of mainstream, but people don't exchange it much, they prefer to keep it. On the main functions of money, mean of exchange, unit of account and reserve of value, I think the last will be bitcoin's main function. It won't be used much as unite of value, because of its volatility (many places that accept bitcoin prefer to announce the prices in USDs). It won't be used a lot as mean of payment, because people will mostly hoard it.

2) Accessibility: the fact that anyone can easily buy, sell and pay with bitcoin. Clearly, this is decisive. If we could exchange and spend bitcoins on the majority of banks' ATMs and retailers, we could say bitcoin is mainstream. But imagine that even in these conditions bitcoin kept being scarcely used, with small demand.  It wouldn't be mainstream. Many physical businesses complain they never had customers paying with bitcoin. So, this is a necessary condition, but it isn't enough.

3) A percentage of people owning it. This seems to be a good criterion. But it isn't easy to establish a number: 10% seems enough, but not 1% or even 5%. 70 or even 350 million users on the all world would be great, but not enough for talking about mainstream. I guess only at 10% we would start to see unfold the problems above mentioned. But this kind of projections is hard to make.

Think about Paypal (I hate it, but let's use it as example). Is Paypal mainstream? I don't think so. It had a volume of transactions of only 180 billion on 2013, about 150 million active registered accounts and in many countries you can use it as mean of payment only on a few places. So, it reached about 2% of world population.

Bitcoin had about 23 billion USDs in trade volume alone during the last 12 months (see http://www.bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=6m, at current price) and maybe 1 or 2 million active users. It still has a long way to go.

Its fascinating to think about the first contacts of those distant cousins and to know that the Neanderthal and in Asian, the Denisovans, and certainly (the local descendents of) the homo erectus, still live in our genes. Who knows, how many other ancient species were absorbed my modern humans.

It's interesting to think that our ancestors were evolving, but didn't have a clue about it. Thanks from the long perspective, we could figure that out after thousands, even millions of years.

I wonder if you really have to engage in that sort of lines. Especially, when many of the posts of both, usually seem reasonable, contrary to many of some others.

If you think someone is overstepping, just ignore him. If he insists too much, you have that left link, the ignore one. Right now, I don't even give far warning.

The notion of ridiculous is completely dependent on the number of people that do the ridiculous thing.

Any thing that is believed by a overwhelming majority of humankind ceases to be ridiculous, even if it is, and having some sort of external respect for it might be a smart way to live. In the past, other attitude was a direct way to the fire. Today, thank god (because of its flaws), that ended.

I surely don't like the mix of religion and political power, hence I disliked very much Morsi, but we can not defend democracy and then crack on the results, unless the elected start violating basic rules.

I don't think that Morsi did enough to deserve a military coup.

Now, Egypt just returned to a new Mubarak, non religious, but dictator, that even promote him self in cookies.

Yes, if we can claim religious motives, every enterprise is justified, even if in the end the motive was envy and the goal to get resources and social and professional status, as were the case for many persecutions of the Jews in Europe.

Actually, most of the "printing" money is just numbers in a computer. The FED or ECB just credit the account of a bank.

They don't even have to waste paper. No one can use it as toilet paper.

The Egyptian elections were an even more ridiculous exercise than the Syrian one. The Egyptians don't have this great excuse that is civil war to justify all the abuses of freedom of the press and political freedom.

I dislike as much (at least part of) the opposition as I dislike the Syrian government. Another republic converted in de facto monarchy, with the power going from the father to the son. I'm expecting a long dynasty, like in North Korea.

But both sides are being helped from abroad. This is just a continuation of the war between Shiite and Sunni movements that we also see in Iraq, supported by Iran on one side, and by Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the other.

Yes, sometimes certain members end up with arguments ad hominem or even insults.

But if we won't argue about religion and politics, life will be very boring.

Mao is probably shaking in his thumb. The current economic system in China has very little of communism or socialism. Private property of the means of production, huge income differences, weak social support, low wages, terrible working conditions.

Taking in account the effective lonely party (they have more parties, but they have no chance of wining any election and live in the shadow of the communist party), the control of the opposition and the lack of political freedom, I would say China system is more similar to a fascism than a socialism.

I think the current status of the FED is unique in major central banks.

They are public entities all over the world, even the bank of England.