z

[NO_SLAVE]

you forgot an option...

-assholes, thieves and incompetence

[Rassah]

You guys talking about government + 51% threat are forgetting one VERY important thing:

Paper money does not compute hashes, no matter how big your pile of money is.
For the government t put those millions of dollars to work to destroy Bitcoin, they first need to actually buy or make A LOT of computing hardware. Too bad for them, almost all good hashing ATI cards are sold out around the world, and we miners aren't willing to part with ours

[bitfreak!]

I find it extremely humorous that the majority here think a slow death is the most likely outcome.

[giszmo]

You guys talking about government + 51% threat are forgetting one VERY important thing:

Paper money does not compute hashes, no matter how big your pile of money is.
For the government t put those millions of dollars to work to destroy Bitcoin, they first need to actually buy or make A LOT of computing hardware. Too bad for them, almost all good hashing ATI cards are sold out around the world, and we miners aren't willing to part with ours

dream on ... said it a million times but will do it again: imagine new pools showing up that offer you 10% more than all the others, greedy miners will happily join those. once these pools reach the size of other pools, they can attack those by mining for them delivering shares but no blocks.
once those malicious pools have a combined 50% of the miners the other pools will get invalid blocks driving more miners to the bad ones. and who's the one to decide which pool is not malicious? and what greedy miner will not mine where he gets BTC, relying that others will make those BTC valuable again in the future?

I believe the bitcoin as is will fail due to greed not supporting the network as it was intended by pools controlling what gets in the block and pools controlling who gets to see the block at what time.

Is there any pool that I can mine for, but still manage all transactions and maybe even the reward? following some rule: if i give only 25% of the reward to the pool, the pool counts that share as a 25% share? This way I could mine for several pools with each share and once I find a block I want to directly broadcast it and not leave that part to the pool. This would also diminish the vulnerability for above described attack as the miners for the bad pool publish their blocks independently of the pool so it can't hold it back.

[sunyag]

It is a problem in fact. The only way bitcoin can survive in the long term, is with governments or powerful organizations protecting it. We should wake up to that reality.

This, of course is not an impossibility. In fact I see many governments allready supporting bitcoin indirectly.

Indeed, the long term is going to be largely dependent on the degree of 'official' sanction.

True, Bitcoin could go rogue (which would be fine and dandy with many current Bitcoin folk), but the masses will sheeple in the direction they are told.

HOWEVER, if (or as many of us believe, when) world currencies collapse, then all bets are off and Bitcoin is setup to be THE game in town.

[Gabi]

The most probable thing is:

General lack of interest leads to slow death

[KeyserSoze]

What will cause it to fail are all the things happening now:
- lack of easy security if stored on one's own machine (people's machines are being hacked just for bitcoins)
- lack of security + extra costs if stored online (web sites exploited, fees - I understand all commerce has fees and exploits but if you want to start a new currency maybe kill the fees until it gets established; bank accounts are insured; credit cards defend against fraud)
- lack of security during trade (i send bitcoins but what if I don't receive my goods?)
- miniscule merchant support (where can I buy toilet paper, Doritos and Mountain Dew with my bitcoins?)
- too high cost to get into the market (It's fun to buy maybe 1 coin at $15 to tell the world "i own a bitcoin" but really? A bitcoin isn't worth anything beyond a novelty to the average person until many of these issues are resolved)
- exchange rates seem easily manipulated so that even speculators remain unwary

It would be pretty neat to see Bitcoin mature and succeed. But whatever happens its been interesting to watch. People are always entertaining. I like the folks that talk about total currency collapse and government meltdown as if in anarchy there would somehow be a concern about computing or even the ability for people to generate electricity on the scale that would allow an electronic currency to remain viable. LOL, currency in those situations would be more basic like food, weapons, sex, clothing. If Mad Max only had access to his wallet.dat file he wouldn't have had it so rough!

[elggawf]

The most probable thing is:

General lack of interest leads to slow death

I feel in a similar vein: either loss of "investor" interest or "investor" alienation -> no business adoption -> long slide to almost-zero value. All the media attention when the economy wasn't really ready for it was just not good for business - hopefully we can push forth out of the funk, but it remains to be seen.

The next 6 months will be telling - people who are in it for 6 months are probably in it until the wheels fall off.