Quote from: mmortal03 on January 14, 2015, 02:56:34 AM

It's like you're arbitrarily defining some kind of universal limitation on the success of Bitcoin because of, or due to the lack of, perfection in some quality that doesn't require perfection to function. (see the perfectionist fallacy: http://www.mhhe.com/mayfieldpub/ct/ch06/glossary.htm )

No, nothing that abstract. I belive that bitcoin cannot be more than a great technical experiment, because:

* The protocol has one fatal flaw: it inevitably leads to centralization of mining in a few large corporations, who then have nearly unlimited power over the system, and must be trusted not to abuse of their power. It is a fatal flaw because it negates the very goal of the protocol ("decentralized trustless"), and no one knows how to fix it. It seems that another genial invention will be needed to fix that flaw.

* The protocol has many defects that make it unsuitable or uncompetitive for the applications that have been (retroactively) proposed for it. For example, the bounded supply led to expectations of astronomical value increases, which induced extreme hoarding of the coin, which made its speculative price rise to 100x its utilitarian value, which caused mining to become 100x more expensive than it should be, which meant 15$ cost per transaction, ... Also, I do not consider the "pay to script" feature worth the complexity that it adds to the blockchain. The cost structure is such that it invites spamming of the blockchain with bogus transactions and messages that have nothing to do with its payment function. The distributed organization limits its response time. The block reward should decrease gradually, instead of being abruptly cut by half every 4 years. The transaction fees should perhaps be required from the start. The organization of the ledger as a linear chain means very long 'sync' times for low-end clients. And many more. These flaws are not fatal, because they do not invalidate the goal stated in the white paper, and could be fixed in a new iteration. But they cannot all be fixed now in the current blockchain.

* Finally, it is not clear to me that the world really needs a payment system like bitcoin. Its expected virtues, of liberating people from oppressive regimes and from excessive bank fees, have yet to be demonstrated (or have already been debunked). On the other hand, bitcoin has been eagerly adopted by criminals and scammers, precisely for those features that were supposed to be virtues. Perhaps the invention of crypto-currencies was not so much like the invention of electricty or the internet, but more like the invention of firearms, or of crack cocaine.