Of course, the complement to this is that people whose knowledge of currency comes largely from Neal Stephenson novels give way too much credence to stories breathlessly championing Bitcoin as the future.
Something that can trace its ancestry in a vague way to Bitcoin? Maybe. Bitcoin itself? Exceedingly unlikely.
I've been wondering about that too. The chances that version 1.0 got it all exactly right is less than perfect. The SolidCoin fork has some interesting criticisms of Bitcoin:
Still some calibration and iteration for Bitcoin to do as new lessons are learned about P2P currency. But the Bitcoin protocol and implementation are under active development, so I wonder to what extent it can still evolve without a reboot.
Mild deflation is the natural state of things - over time, most tasks should take less labor to accomplish because of improvements in technology and organization. Are we to prefer that a man who labors enough to buy four gallons of milk can only purchase a one if he chooses to do so 30 years later, even though the cost of producing milk in real terms (and indeed the price of milk in real terms) has decreased?