Good factual article thart points out some obvious near-term challenges while maintaining an optimistic long term view.
Bitcoin isn't ready for primetime. What precipitated the crash was a failure of infrastructure. At the height of the panic, almost every major bitcoin trading tool was down either due to traffic overload or rumored denial of service attacks including Mt. Gox; Bitcoinity, another exchange; Bitcoin Charts, a popular site for monitoring markets; and even the bitcoin forums.
For a market that was at one point worth over $2 billion, that’s a big joke and completely unacceptable. It’s also unavoidable. Waves of hype will often outpace the development of infrastructure, and there’s something about human nature that fuels these inevitable bubbles. Whatever the reason—whether it be greed or mob mentality or something else entirely—the fact remains that the services and systems that support the burgeoning bitcoin ecosystem aren't yet able to keep up with demand when things get crazy.
Bitcoin isn’t dead. Even at around $60, the value of bitcoin is still up over 100 percent since it matched its last all-time high in the low $30 range just two months ago. One trend is clear, at $60 or at $250, the bitcoin ecosystem continues to expand. Every day, more companies are accepting bitcoins, more companies are being created to serve bitcoin users, and more people are acquiring bitcoins.
Digital currencies like bitcoin are still a long way from going mainstream, but that's okay since the system wasn’t ready to anyway. What we do know is that, crash or no crash, we are on the cusp of something brand new, a truly disruptive technology that could change the way we see money forever--even if we're still a few years off.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/lessons-from-the-second-great-bitcoin-crash
