Quote from: futureofbitcoin on September 16, 2015, 04:36:44 AM

I normally agree with everything you said, gentlemand, and I agree with the reasoning in the post. What I am not sure of, is the timeline. Assuming bitcoin doesn't take off (price or in any other way), how long do you think bitcoin will last before the bigger players start to lose interest and bitcoin really starts to "die"?

Maybe I was being a drama queen. Time will tell. Let's go for 2024 instead.

From listening to the VCs, many of them have quite a lengthy time frame of a decade or so but that's irrelevant if adoption is still hopelessly flat or actively falling before their time frame runs out.

The world is moving ever faster and I'd say gaining proper traction is a one shot deal for Bitcoin, not the technology it gave birth to.

It's not a passive thing waiting to be unearthed and repackaged some time in the future. It requires a lot of ongoing maintenance, commitment and effort from a lot of people to keep it ticking over and growing, and its potential future users have to see such toil taking place to develop the faith that it needs.

If we guess where the infrastructure should or could be in 2020 - shit exchanges gone forever, scalability dealt with, legal and regulatory grey areas cleared up, foolproof solutions for usage - and that doesn't look like it'll ever foster what it's intended to which is a decently-sized closed loop economy and lots of fiat interaction, then the future is looking dicey.

Miners will keep on trucking but they're backroom boys that the public is barely aware of. If the public faces that make it all usable such as the present and future Bitpays, Coinbases and exchanges eventually throw in the towel then it's not looking good and at present they're placing just as much speculative faith on the whole thing as anyone in this forum.

If it was effectively discarded en masse I don't think a resurrection would ever be on the cards. I think there's a relatively narrow window for it to take off and if it doesn't then no one will care other than those who tried to make it happen. It's a million miles away from being 'too big to fail'.