Quote from: piramida on April 18, 2014, 12:39:17 PM

Nope, very bad analogy, shows that you still don't understand what bitcoin is. Today we have tcp/ip, just as we had it back in 1990. Supporting network of tcp/ip communicating devices have grown tremendously since then, but the protocol is still the same. Google and Facebook are just some of the currently popular applications on top of that. Will there be a whole application layer on top of bitcoin network? Absolutely. Does it mean bitcoin network will be thrown away? Not faster than ipv4, which is being replaced with ipv6 for 20 years now. Any change that requires replacing hardware infrastructure worldwide is hard and is done only out of absolute necessity. I don't see such a necessity with bitcoin (yet?).

I don't need to understand 'what Bitcoin is' to know that any kind of technology, or utilisation of technology is always liable to be improved upon with early versions of things nearly always becoming redundant due to improvements in newer upgraded versions of a technology and/or the original technology running into unforseeable problems.

Failing for some X-Factor involving emergency capital flight, Bitcoin is going to $200 range. No doubt it will spike down here strongly and rebound back again to test the long term down trend as we have seen many times before. If demand for Bitcoin fails to take it over and beyond the long term down trend as currently seems to be the case once again at $540, then who is to say at what price level Bitcoin must trend or crash down to before organic demand picks up again. Now, without knowing a whole lot about it, I have read that the average cost of mining 1 BTC is somewhere around $300. If Bitcoin spends any length of time beneath this price level then the miners must surely start to switch of their rigs in droves, and with that down goes a great chunk of the Bitcoin network. Unless I am missing something, the whole system could come to a painstaking grinding halt and such a situation would spell out the need for a serious reappraisal of the way in which the Bitcoin system is structured and would have even the most hard bitten of Bitcoin investors cashing out in droves.

If I were a bankster wanting to destroy Bitcoin, I would make sure that exactly this happened. I could do this, and I could profit from doing it.

If I were a bankster wanting my establishment house to take a controlling stake in Bitcoin, I could do this, I could profit in doing it, and I could scoop up a million or two of BTC at unthinkable rock bottom prices before ramping the price back up to levels where the miners could turn their rigs back on and profitably mine.

I would suggest that a great many forseeable and unforseeable obstacles lie in Bitcoin's path and there is absolutely no guarantee that they will all be overcome without the need for some kind of crypto rethink.