No one can predict the future, a fork is inevitable sooner or later, but it will be desired as long as it is benefiting end users

But this seems more like a political issue: In a distributed world, how do people make decisions? In a GIT world, it is the main programmer/code owner acting as king of the hierarchical, another type of monarchy, and that system require super intelligence and wisdom for the king

Now I understand why banks have to hire so many people to take care of the account related activities

OK, at least this part is scalable, I guess in the future it will more likely to be hosted on a data center like those banks do today, distributed data center maybe

I believe from client side there will be a solution, but how about blockchain itself?

After some study I can see that with today's 400 transaction/10minute rate, the block size is already 250K, if BTC gained popularity quickly, then there will be thousands of transactions per minute

Where is this 1MB max block size coming from? And for how long it can hold?

Take a look at the latest blocks, a block with 400 transactions will reach 250KB in size, but 400 transactions in 10 minute is nothing if compared with a small stock exchange which typically can handle 1000 transactions in 1 second.

It means we are going to see at least 1000 times increase in size of each block if BTC's scale is to match one of those smaller stock exchanges

I don't understand the technical details, but look at the blockchain size chart:
https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size

if all the transactions are recorded in blockchain, it will surely grow out of the capacity of any hard disk in one year, after another year, it will grow out of the capacity of any storage server farm I know. This has to be solved as soon as possible

Any client should only interested in those transactions related to his own account, for other transactions he can use block explorer to search, maybe someone from a bank can explain how bank handle huge amount of transaction records?

I don't understand why the blockchain has grown exponentially in the latest months, with that huge size of the database on hard drive, it's getting difficult to convince new users to start to use it: They have to wait a whole day to download the block chain.

Is there any light client which download only latest part of blockchain and verify the rest part using only a checksum?

I'm also looking into this aspect, I think that sooner or later electricity will again become the deciding factor for profitability

Today a miner use FPGA to mine 1 BTC/day with 10% paid for electricity, and next year he will use ASIC miner and network difficulty will rise accordingly, he still mine 1 BTC/day with almost the same electricity cost. If the electricity cost so little, he could easily expand his operation 10X to get 10 BTC per day, and everyone else will also do the same, together they will push the difficulty to 10X level, at that time, the electricity for that miner will cost 1BTC/day, but return stays at 1BTC/day unchanged

ROI is not important, but profitability is important. When there are plenty of capital (I heard that QE3 is coming) can flow into the market to chase those 3600 BTC,  there will be mass produced ASIC miners everywhere, and their price will drop quickly. But when the electricity cost rise to a level that most of the miner can not operate profitably, the total network hashing power will be stablized

Supply is limited, this is maybe the single entity on this planet which have limited supply (Nature resource also have the same character but difficult to move)

Super liquidate, can act as a store of value due to it's limited supply nature, and the credit is backed by mathematics and networks, both have almost become religion for people living on this planet

Cheap currency will drive out expensive currency, people hoard BTC, and spend USD, so there will be less and less trade done by BTC. I expect that there will be BTC backed cash appear, back to the old banking system

There are only 7200 coins to be mined every day no matter what kind of mining machine people setup, this is a big difference compared to gold mining

Newer hardware and heavy investment just redistribute a portion of the daily coin to people who have higher hashing power, and unless the BTC value increase exponentially, their return on investment will drop quickly as they invest more, I think this is the most interesting part in BTC

In today's difficulty, those first deploy the ASIC SC single will get about 20 BTC per day, but after a while it will drop quickly, back to 2 BTC per day maybe. Actually BFL is really good at making the pricing for their equipment, targeting a ROI time frame of about 6-12 months

The inherent character of BTC is racing,  if you are not the first one with good hashing power in the first several hours, then your return will drop quickly

Another problem is that BTC system still rewards the richer, if you can get a 10 million $ loan, you can compromise the whole system with ASIC farms, sadly that means decentralization is always in danger, technically/financially there will always be a winner, but that maybe is the truth on this planet, winner take it all, losers can work much harder than winner, but they won't change the landscape

I saw the BTC wiki page of deflation spiral has been updated, now they don't think it is a problem as long as people have expectation for deflation from the beginning

I guess that bitcoin will exist at certain scale to suit those who prefer Austrian school economics, or serve the purpose of saving, people save in BTC, spend in fiat. BTC will act more like a type of real estate, but super easy to transfer internationally.

GPU is almost riskless investment since you can still use those high end GPUs to play games for couple of years

GPUs have already wiped out those CPU mining possibilities, due to it's almost 40X efficiency increase, just hope after many people have merged to ASIC mining, there are no such dramatic increase in efficiency again

It's good to hoard, that is BTC made for

So far, the network is maintained by the people mining coins, after all the coins were mined, there will be problem to maintain the block chain, the transaction time will dramatically increase, so I anticipate some time later a change to the code is unavoidable, if BTC is going to survive for the long run

Some thing I wonder:

ASICs said to use 1/4 of the power and provide 10 times performance than same size FPGA

Now a FPGA miner using 80W to generate 800MH/s
Same size of ASIC will use only 20W, while generate 8GH/s, devide by 2, still use 10W to generate 4GH/s. I don't understand how come a USB port can power 10W equipment?

I remember the I0COIN public lunch, in the first 5 minutes I could mine several blocks and the second day I could only mine several coins

Same thing will happen to ASICs, during the first several batches the difficulty will rise quickly but eventually it will stablize and only those have the long term patience will still carry on

There is a potential problem: Today many miners are using gaming GPUs to do mining, they do this easily without any other investment. But if ASIC comes out and GPUs are not capable of generate meaningful coin anymore, they might just quit mining and forget about BTC, this will in turn dramatically reduce the popularity and the support of BTC, unless ASIC devices can be purchased everywhere like GPU today. FPGA's performance are on par with GPUs, so they never made any threat to GPUs, but ASICs are different

Use pre-order money to make the production happen, good business model, especially now when loan generally are difficult to get

I guess BFL were difficult to cover their cost on FPGA operation,  FPGA devices do not really provide real performance leap over GPU, thus ignored by most of the users

And in their eyes, BTC is just a game, they are the gaming device maker, as long as they could make profit by making gaming console, they do not care about the rest, anyway profit in USD has much less risk. BTC's future is always a puzzle

True, unless there are several ASIC builders there, but decentralize is not very important, since the coin generation speed is the same, from time point of view, the distribution of BTC has always been decentralized

A single ASIC rack can stands for about 8% of the total network hash power today, this means if there are 13 of such rig, then the difficulty will double. So either normal user invest in ASIC equipment or get nothing at all by mining using GPU

Today a great amount of hash power is distributed evenly between many gamers and GPU retailers, but when ASIC take over, the BTC will be concentrate to a small amount of people, thus decrease the supply dramatically

But I think that is a bad trend, sooner or later the coin generation will be centralized to some people who are interested in investing big to establish ASIC farms, then they will more or less affect the money supply as the same way as FED (if they spend BTC, then money supply will increase, if they hoard, BTC supply will decrease), but in a much less efficient manner, FED do not need to hash to generate coin anyway