The average consumer is not going to partake in bitcoin when transactions can take hours or even days (currently waiting 3+ hours to move money between accounts). Bitcoin is a fad and will never be a real currency due to the massive draw backs that are built into the currency itself and can not be counted. One of the reasons to use Bitcoin was due to the low fees. The fees will continue to raise as mining cost increase and people have to pay higher and higher fees just to get their bitcoin moved to a new location.
You will never be able to walk into a shop and just pay for an item. You will have to wait untill the transaction is confirmed which is currently taking hours and will eventually take days/weeks.
Bitcoin will fail once a better digital currency is introduced.
and it will fail after the initial investor insiders exit the system.
you're 100% right there is NO WAY that we can affordably sustain all this Proof of Work nonsense for much longer. They may have to include Color Coins in order to(try to) stay on top of NXT but this will make things MUCH more complex and will not solve the basic problems that have been discussed many times.
-bm