What can bitcoin's childhood indicate about its adulthood?

[Soliloguy]

There have always been hopes of major vendor adoption (eBay, Paypal, Amazon...) that could help launch bitcoin into widespread use. Now there is increased focus on major investor interest (SecondMarket, the Winklevoss ETF, whatever the Chinese may end up doing...), which may be a magnification of the kind of speculative investment that got BTC on the news this year.

The investor side, no doubt, is preoccupied with return-on-investment and climbing BTC/$ ratios. The more purist currency-use side may prefer to see some price stabilization, and more media coverage about how many things you can buy with bitcoins and how revolutionary the technology could be... rather than simply gasping at how the price keeps going up and some folks got rich riding some kind of weird rocketship built out of 0s and 1s...

Bitcoin's got a long future ahead of it, and what its best uses will be is worth thinking and talking about. I'm curious if we'll see more vendor adoption soon and dynamic btc usage, or if it'll shape up into more of a wealth storage asset for people to use sort of like interest-yielding savings accounts.

So what do yall think? I ask this of the newcomers, not only because my new account requires me to... but also because it's the newly invested and interested who will make up the biggest portion of the overall bitcoin human base, and I'm curious what your impressions are going into this thing!

[davidbow]

Nobody can predict the future
I hope that Bitcoin expect a great future.

[MicroGuy]

So what do yall think? I ask this of the newcomers, not only because my new account requires me to... but also because it's the newly invested and interested who will make up the biggest portion of the overall bitcoin human base, and I'm curious what your impressions are going into this thing!

Bitcoin started the transformation of currencies and will continue to gain traction in traditional marketplaces.

As the consumer gains awareness the exploration of altcoins will follow. Then we will see competing digital currencies gaining traction as bitcoin's dominance becomes challenged. It's possible that Bitcoin can maintain it's dominance with the altcoins fighting over second place.

However, I suspect a new winner will eventually emerge and take over the top position.

[greenlion]

Third-party adoption is not a requirement for Bitcoin's success, it's actually the opposite cause and effect.

If Bitcoin continues developing and thriving, third parties will need to be in the game to survive. This is particularly true in highly-inefficient markets that are the low-hanging fruit of BTC adoption.

The first firms to go will be the Western Unions of the world, who are currently enjoying a ridiculous rent-seeking position that the blockchain immediately obliterates. Next are the big payment processors like VISA, because from a merchant's point of view, Bitcoin is massively technologically superior in very tangible economic terms. A zero confirmation transaction just validated by checking against the blockchain is already massively superior to any service VISA actually offers to merchants, and just one confirmation is something that VISA can't even match in the span of a whole month.

Bitcoin does not need these accessory industries. These accessory industries will need Bitcoin.

[Soliloguy]

...
Bitcoin does not need these accessory industries. These accessory industries will need Bitcoin.

Do you think those industries will absorb or buy bitcoin's payment tech in order to streamline their current business model (and honestly, to avoid being left in the dust)? Or will the bitcoin community have the marketing and developmental gusto to compete and eventually take over, before somebody like Visa appreciates the elegance of the blockchain and tries to swallow it whole...

On the other, other hand, if this plays out like bittorrent with music and file sharing, the established industry may just slowly crumble into a pile of dinosaur bones while more people carry on with their newer, sleeker mammalian society

[Soliloguy]

Bitcoin started the transformation of currencies and will continue to gain traction in traditional marketplaces.

As the consumer gains awareness the exploration of altcoins will follow. Then we will see competing digital currencies gaining traction as bitcoin's dominance becomes challenged. It's possible that Bitcoin can maintain it's dominance with the altcoins fighting over second place.

However, I suspect a new winner will eventually emerge and take over the top position.

That's an interesting possibility!

The excitement around large-cap institutional investment in bitcoin makes me wonder if the "bitcoin is digital gold" may end up having some truth to it. Which, if that does turn out to be the case, would probably mean most people will keep hoarding their digital gold in their digital vault, and not spend it with the same velocity. Even when the U.S. had gold coinage, the cheaper silver coinage was used for more of the everyday purchases... Which is probably why Litecoin likes to call itself the silver to bitcoin's gold. Do you think there's any merit to that claim?

Also, there are some alt coins with kinda specific purposes, sorta like namecoin and peercoin... Do you picture a world where different industries or communities favor one coin or another because of its particular characteristics? There are tons of coins and projects I know nothing about yet, which is a big part of what brought me to this forum!