No, I meant 'ensures'.
Indeed, my mistake. I'm on a hair-trigger for people transposing those words and misread your statement. Sorry.
Everything else you posted actually supports my statement.
Well you're simply making statements about the present, whereas I'm looking at the trajectory and envisioning what bitcoin can become. The former is uninteresting to me, whereas the latter is what this whole thing is about. Honestly, the ecosystem has come a lot farther a lot faster than I would've expected. The unfortunate side-effect, as noted, has been the premature injection of, shall we say, less thoughtful folks with ridiculously short-term-minded expectations.
Now a lot of those folks have turned into bears who just look to the fact that Bitcoin is *currently* not a robust, brain-dead-simple secure, liquid, high-volume, low-volatility currency and financial system and conclude that it's fundamentally non-viable. That's just unfair, myopic, opportunistic, and a little nuts to me. But Clifford Stoll would probably approve:
http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306No problem, Mel.
I agree with you about the potential for Bitcoin. In a perfect world, it would be the only currency that makes sense. However, it simply cannot survive the onslaught of scammers, ignorant users, online security issues, and bad publicity currently prevalent. 2015 is already starting off worse than 2014. Combine the fact that there's still a few hundred thousand BTC waiting to be dumped, the Silk Road trial (which will bring negative light to the industry during it's entire run), infighting amongst developers, disagreement within the foundation, and a community literally overrun with fraud - and nothing looks positive.
There's also the fact that it now costs much more to mine a Bitcoin than it's worth, and those mining companies who make up the bulk of the network hash rate are now being pressured to dump every coin they mint. They have USD backed loans that need to be paid.
We are not in a good spot, at all.
Though I completely understand the perspective that Melbustus is coming from, I hate to say it but I am siding with Rawted on this one. Will bitcoin recover? Who knows, but one thing I do believe regardless is that decentralized crypto currencies will be the norm at some point in the future...was just really hoping it might take place during my lifetime and who knows, perhaps it still will.