Quote from: Hunyadi on December 17, 2014, 11:40:27 AM

Quote from: JorgeStolfi on December 17, 2014, 11:37:03 AM

Quote from: podyx on December 16, 2014, 07:26:48 PM

Really looks like that bitcoin failed as an experiment

I think that it is still working as the technical experiment that it was meant to be: a test of whether the PoW/reward/majority protocol would indeed motivate miners to mine, and prevent sabotage of a decentralized ledger.

Bitcoin was not meant to be a replacement or alternative to credit cards, a sound investment, a way to evade law enforcement, to weaken governments, to turn losers into millionaires, etc.. Others appropriated it and have been trying to redefine it as some or all of these things.

The technical experiment has worked for five years in spite of (not because of) its massive "adoption" by half a million people for those purposes. From the purely technical point of view, the only problem that has surfaced in these 6 years is the centralization of mining, due to use of specialized chips and economies of scale. That development was not expected, and may be technically its failure.

Bitcoin may be failing only for some of the things it was never meant to be used for.

http://media3.giphy.com/media/Vyt6KFrfwGSxq/200.gif

Not at all. Even if bitcoin dies (I highly doubt it is anytime soon. There's so much venture capital being pumped into this to expand infrastructure and I read more and more about different companies accepting it.) The price is going to bottom out soon. It's going to stabilize roughly around this range. Maybe go up higher in value as more mainstream acceptance becomes apparent. At the worst what the experiment shows is that a deflationary currency is not sustainable. At best it shows that a deflationary currency is sustainable and shrouds the world in blockchain technology. That is where bitcoin will make the biggest difference. The blockchain. Bitcoin may die. But the altcoins are going to carry on. For sure.