Maybe that is effectively what you are saying, but in that scenario I would see Bitcoin values mostly just continue to rise until the demand for crypto-currencies was saturated. The main Bitcoin transactions would be relatively large transfers swapping backing value between competing crypto-currencies.
Quite possibly. When that problem approaches, some time will be bought, I think, by big players running the only functioning instances of bitcoind (which will all have to be on highly connected servers)
I'm suspecting that I'll be operating a few in one cloud or another or some corner of a datacenter. It would be most distasteful to me if/when it comes to this however. I very much like the fact that almost anyone can run the full block-chain almost anywhere, and Bitcoin will be a much less compelling proposition to me when this is no longer the case.
, and most users of bitcoin will be using it through electrum-like clients and wallet services. People will have to pay a meaningful fee to create a real block chain transaction, which would be today's equivalent of a bank wire. Everyday people will conduct business through bitcoin "banks", today's equivalent of someone sending BTC from their MtGox account to another MtGox account. (Such a transfer settles privately and never appears on the block chain.)
The presentation by Dan Kaminsky pretty much predicts this same thing, though Kaminsky frames it as us having to go back to the same "banks" Bitcoin was created to free us from. I don't see it so harshly though - because these banks will be propped up by the free market and backed by free market currency, not propped up by the government and backed by a promise that the government will print more money and/or confiscate more wealth from the people to make up for anything that goes wrong.
I don't really see the necessity for banks (though I've got nothing against them as an option and recognize some of the nicities in terms of efficiency and speed.)
With a myriad of different kinds of crypto-currencies distributed the load of a fraction of a global economy, it seems to me that people could opt to use crypto-currencies independently of banks as an option. I might choose to run (and possibly mine) PeepCoin and NewNameCoin because they cover my needs, but neglect SilkCoin because drugs are not an interest of mine these days (and if I get an urge to toke out again after 20 years, it's easy to trade some PeepCoin for some SilkCoin on an exchange.) I might also be forced to mine Bitcoin because that is one of the requirements of mining (or just using) PeepCoin.
Or I may choose to avoid the hassles and just use a bank.
I think using banks is going to become unavoidable, if for no reason other than the confirmations issue. If you have a bank account with Bitcoins in it, and a trusted entity (a bank) promises to pay a merchant on your behalf for goods you want to buy, then there is no need for said merchant to wait for confirmations to process a transaction. All they need to do is receive confirmation from the bank that the bank promises to pay.
A debit card for Bitcoins, if you will.
A merchant could accept 0-conf transactions as "good enough", which would work for a while, but it wouldn't be long before people came up with all sorts of schemes and softwares to help them rip off the retail stores (i.e. make a transaction appear on the retailer's system, then withdraw it or create another transaction using the same funds). And judging by the number of people who have no ethical problem with pirating copyrighted content, I have no doubt that this sort of activity would be rampant if retailers accepted 0-conf transactions.
Anywho, that's my tangent on this thread for the day.
...and then, a government who likes Bitcoin will decide to print notes of exchange for them! They will keep 100% reserves of Bitcoins to match the notes printed, so each person can be certain that each 1 Bitcoin note will be worth exactly 1 Bitcoin, and can exchange them with the government at any time. But then, the government changes the name to "Notes", and doesn't keep a 100% reserve anymore. They continue printing the notes, despite the lack of Bitcoins backing them. Finally, said government withdraws the ability for people to exchange their notes for Bitcoins.
I would hope that this wouldn't happen, but would almost laugh if it did. Fortunately, those of us holding BTC from the start would be the ones in a good place when/if something like that ever went down.
This cycle takes decades. Essentially, they can't start the next round of bait-and-switch until most of the people that lived through the end of the last round are dead.
And until they swap some words around in the published and taught history textbooks.