[ubernostrum]

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.

[SkyMarshal]

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:

http://solidcoin.info/faq.php

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.