1. IT'S A DECENTRALIZED CURRENCY
Does this even require any explaining? Do you honestly think that the current financial system that controls Trillions of dollars in the current global economy, is going to give up their power to some guy Guatemala because he ran he's 1990's computer the first year of Bitcoin.
Let's all open up our history books and see when the 99% won against the 1%? Almost never, and even when they did win it was basically the 1% handing off power to another form, and still running it behind the scenes just to appease the people.
Even if they allowed Bitcoin to become successful, they will regulate it so heavily, that it will pretty much lose any benefits that it had, (Europe is preparing to tax and regulate Bitcoin) and pretty much becomes centralized and just like anything else.
The current system will stay in power with centralized control, hence why they will create their own digital fiat currencies replacing their paper, to even gain more control.
Let's be optimistic. Let's say a distributed ledger like Bitcoin allows for a true global democracy and a way to usurp our current corruption! Underdog story to end all underdog stories.
2. CENTRALIZED MAIN DEVELOPMENT
Basically the official releases come from the Bitcoin Foundation. The development is pretty much centralized. Even if people fix everything wrong with Bitcoin, the foundation makes the final decision on what to include in it's next version on it's own priorities. This is basically all run by Gavin who caused Satoshi to disappear after he decided to meet with the CIA. The same guy who has not addressed any of the issues going to be discussed below for the whole time he has been in control. Whether by accident or on purpose is not the point. The point is the main trusted Bitcoin client is controlled by one entity, and everything they say, do, or don't do goes.
Let's not get all paranoid. Open source fork and pull...of course somebody's gotta do some work on it. Gavin et al are astute and have Bitcoin's best interest at heart.
3. FLAWED ARCHITECTURE
Size
11 GB today.
100 GB 1.5 years from now
1 TB 3 years from now
10 TB 4.5 years from now
100 TB 6 years from now
1 PB 7.5 years from now
10 PB 9 years from now
100 PB 10.5 years from now
You think average people will store a 100TB worth of data? No. The solution cut the blockchain into pieces and store the whole blockchain only on specialized nodes, kind of defeats the purpose of decentralized than doesnt it?
Your breakdown is flawed. And also the "average" person doesn't run a full node. If any pruning has to take place, it's not going to centralize Bitcoin.
Double Spends
Double spends are already occurring, and have occurred since over 1.5 years ago, and it will only get worst as time goes on, and bigger merchants and higher ticket items come online the then you will really see the bad pool operators start to take advantage of this.
Nobody is going to double spend on a cup of coffee, nobody is going to commit fraud for small amounts, well at least not in person, but they will for big ticket items.
This doesn't have potential to be an endemic problem.
Slow Speed
Waiting for a transaction to fully confirm, is not feasible for day to day transactions. Yes let's hear the Credit Cards take 180 day confirms. One no they don't they confirm instantly, the money is just on hold for 90-180 days if the merchant sells a crappy product and refuses to honor warranty or remedy the issue. If it's fraud, say someone uses someone else card to buy something, the money does not come out of the merchants account, the credit card company takes the hit. Secondly, most important the buyer pays and gets his goods immediately, unlike Bitcoin where they have to wait for a few confirmations to be sure.
Built-in escrow. Insurance services.
Un-Scalable
Bitcoin can barley handle a few hundred thousand transactions a day, what happens if the transactions grow to 10 Million, 50 Million, 100 Million which are all still relativity small transaction numbers compared to the 6 Billion people in the world. It simply can't handle it.
What exactly do you mean? Are you talking about the blocksize?
51% Attacks
51% attacks which don't have to be 51% of the network, as they can do it with far less hashpower, such as ghash.io 29% the two biggest pools combined make up over 51% of the network and can literally destroy Bitcoin at any second. It doesn't even need to be the pool operators, it can be hackers who take over the pools.
Why would they want to destroy Bitcoin?
Unstable Exchange Rate
It can never be used as a sole currency to replace all other fiat currencies. Why? Because it's price is unstable. It must always rely on another fiat currency to have any sort of monetary use, no merchant is going to transact when the price of the currency fluctuates 50-200% a day. The only way to stop this is to have actual control of the currency and adjust creation.
Come one man, really? It will eventually stabilize and you won't need to think about it in terms of Dollars
4. NO BENEFIT OVER FIAT
With everything mentioned above it shows that Bitcoin has no real advantage over fiat for 99% of the people in the world. You can't pay your bills or general living expenses in it, can't buy much with it. It's slow, not consumer friendly, as once a payment is sent there is no charge back method. Guess what 90% of the world are consumers not merchants. If Bitcoin doesn't appeal to the regular consumer who buys goods from merchants it will never succeed. Even if it succeeds it's doomed by it's very architecture which can't handle the success.
The only use it has, is sending small internationally pretty quickly, which then again gets converted to fiat for people to actually use. What market is there for small international payments 5-10% of the world?
No entity would trust high sums of money to be transferred with Bitcoin with all of it's flaws. Want to know how right I am and how wrong you are? Bitcoin has about 3 million users in a 5 year period. Facebook in that same time had what? 600M-1 Billion users.
Not to mention by the time, I have opened 10 accounts just to buy and convert Bitcoin, I could have swiped my credit/debit card 1000 times.
These arguments are so near-sighted. Can you just give it a few years?
5. CONCLUSION
Even if Bitcoin or another crypto currency fixes all of these issues, they are still doomed to fail because of reason #1. Let's please remember that Bitcoin is Constitutionally-protected. It's a commodity exchange mechanism based on a decentralized proof of work public ledger. We have as much right as anyone to make private market. What if people didn't preclude even more egregious violations of our civil rights?
With zero advantages and quite a few disadvantages over fiat, centralized incompetent development, and inhert flaws Bitcoin is doomed. So next time you get excited about Bitcoin growing, and can't wait for it's mass adaption, just know it's own growth is another nail in it's coffin. Bitcoin is digging it's own grave.
Before all the geniuses on this forum come and give your wonderful flawed opinions, and say how wonderful it is, and it's going places, and I am wrong, and Gavin will fix everything, and Bitcoin will take over the world as a currency and payment system. Please refer below to get a reality check:
Bitcoin users in 5 years: 3 Million
It's still new bud
