Why do you think stakes will only be accumulated and never spent? After all, humans are humans, they will spend and cash out to buy stuff (including assets on the asset exchange) or buy stuff directly with the crypto when more merchants accept it. Why do you think the price of NXT hasn't been going anywhere for a year? It's because those stakeholders are cashing out and a lot of coins have already changed hands. Apparently your theory of eternal growth of stakes doesn't work.

Either way sooner or later Bitcoin is f*cked. Large miners are the weak point. Centralization and regulation is inevitable in PoW if it ever grows big enough.

Alright, users and small miners would stay on their old fork, but large miners that control the network would have to comply with the regulations or shut down operations. Eventually users would have to either sell their Bitcoins (sell them on the old or new fork) or switch to and stay on the new regulated fork as well. What's wrong/impossible with this picture I just drew?

It's just another indication of the bear market, which started at the beginning of 2014 and in all likelihood will go on for another 11-12 months.

Can't agree more with the OP.

Wouldn't large miners (who basically control the network) have to comply with any provision issued to them (including modified code with whatever rules regulators think of to code in there)? Regulators don't bother with this just yet, as they see that Bitcoin is too small and fading away by itself to become irrelevant due to its flaws, and it's cheaper for them socially to just wait it out. But if it didn't fade away and began to grow to threaten the fiat system, be sure, they'd issue this license in a heart beat.

Not all humans need an isle with a mansion, you know. But you're right about the rest, he/she/they could sell a lot.

Don't you need to invest in ASICs and invest a lot to get a lot of ASICs or invest a lot into R&D to get more efficient ASICs, and all that with the same purpose - to have a larger impact on the network? What's the difference with PoS then, besides electricity waste and all the inconvenience that comes with all this ASIC work that only a limited number of geeks can enjoy to do?

You're a brave Legendary member, not many would admit to hold NXT. I noticed this is a no-no among early Bitcoin adopters. Kudos to you!

You can now buy A, B and C crypto in a bunch of ways, but the true question is WHY? What unique use cases do A, B and C cryptos offer to users that people would buy them? That is the key to adoption.

Please make it in PDF format, just like that infamous pdf that all the PoW geeks refer to all the time

Can you be more technical please? Wild life vs. zoo is picturesque and all, but what makes you think that users care about building all that equipment, dealing with all the troubles, electricity, figuring out mining costs, trying to break even, if they can just turn on their PC, do their normal work or socializing and the PoS wallet will be doing work in the background? Like I said, PoW is for geeks, but geeks don't power wider adoption, and the number of geeks is limited, which leads to issues like centralized network and less actual users of the crypto, it's all revolving around miners in a PoW crypto.

So can we expect one company to develop super powerful ASICs and totally hijack the PoW network? Wow, that's scary. In PoS anybody can be a miner with their normal computer, I say it's very attractive to users. Users drive the price and adoption, not miners. Crypto should be user-centric, not miner-centric, to be successful. And that's where PoW fails.

What's the difference with PoW? You spend more on equipment, you control more. You can collude with other large miners.

EDIT: the only difference like I said is waste and inconvenience. In PoS anybody can be a miner by just leaving their wallet opened, so user = miner -> more decentralized network in the long run. In PoW only geeks can be miners -> more centralized network in the long run.

They won't be getting additional profit by colluding, so what's the purpose of that? It works exactly like miners in a pool: if you solo mine, you will get a block occasionally, if you mine in a pool you get regular profit but it's small, and over the long term it works out to what you'd get if you mined solo.

Holders of stakes in a PoS model don't compete? It's the same competition: in PoW - who can afford to buy the best and more hardware, in PoS - who can afford to buy more stake. The difference is hardware wastes electricity and other kinds of waste that come with PoW mining.

 

That's actually a question in the OP. Different people define 'Bitcoin failed' in different ways, you need to post your definition, as well as your thoughts on if that happens would it have other cryptos fail too. No, I don't mean a catastrophic encryption flaw.

It would be the currency offering consumers unique use cases. By 'unique' I mean something that consumers can't use their fiat for to buy and would be forced to convert their fiat to that crypto. No, drugs don't qualify as a unique use case.

This bear market is part of the bubble phase of 2013, the willy bot did a lot of damage to the organic growth, irrational exuberance moods were galore among investors, now that has to be completely shaken out before prices can start rising again.

The problem is, even though the healthy value of an asset may be N and during the bubble phase it temporarily goes to the unsustainable N + X, when it corrects during the bear market it doesn't simply go back to N, but it overshoots (just like it did during the bubble phase) and goes to N - Y. Yes, this is stating the obvious, but the significance of this is that based on this fact bear markets take a long time to unfold (2 years on average), as investors start to buy when it goes back to N thinking the bear market is over and they can now buy at the fair value, but the market plays a trick and goes even lower, which prolongs the damage to investor sentiment.

Now what does that bring us to? Bitcoin fair value price right now could be at $300-400 range, but that doesn't mean it can't go lower, N - Y as a final shakeout. That's not so much of a problem per se unless you use leverage, but if it did dive like that, it would likely add another few months to the bear market as sentiments are depressed, hence my projection that no recovery ($500+) is possible till November 2015. Coupled with the halving of block rewards still some 20-21 months away which keeps the inflation rate at a substantial level and short-term strengthening of the USD, I estimate the likelihood of this scenario to be no less than 70%.