[pash]

Are you asking me about the capabilities of the techology, or are you asking me to predict the future? I'm giving you the former.

I don't know what Bitcoin will look like in ten years. I do understand the technology and am interested in having a discussion about it. But on Hacker News, in threads like this one, a great many of the comments demonstrate fundamental technical misunderstandings or seem to regard Bitcoin as a mature ecosystem. So I think it's appropriate to try to dispel the ignorance and to emphasize that Bitcoin is actually a nascent technology, one that offers far more than the rudimentary sort of magic Internet money that we see today. Bitcoin is a base layer for permission-lite financial innovation in whatever direction the market demands. You can build all sorts of stuff on top of it.

That means that if Bitcoin's still around in a decade, the ecosystem will likely look very different from today's. "Assume we will never have a ladder," you seem to be saying. Meanwhile, plenty of capable people are hard at work building ladders.

[cpwright]

I find the fundamental disconnect to be that people are pushing the lower-cost transactions as a bit motivation for Bitcoin. The less enthusiastic point out all of the good anti-fraud infrastructure credit cards have from a consumer perspective. Then the proponents point out you can build that on Bitcoin, which is true; but it doesn't come for free, thus I expect mostly negating the transaction cost advantages that Bitcoin is potentially offering.

[dangerlibrary]

I can give you a sense of the future: Bitcoin will become completely unusable because the blockchain is growing at an increasing rate.

https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&show...