When the coin rewards decline to near 0 roughly 2040ish, then my discovery is that the transaction fees rewards can not scale as a percentage of the commerce, because the transaction fee in comparative dollars would be much higher than fiat alternatives.
Either this is a typo, or you beleive there will still be debt-based government backed currencies in 2040.
If we don't replace Bitcoin (which I do believe we will, I'm encouraged to see Litecoin's price rising to $36 with $1.2 billion mcap, although Litecoin has probably all the same vulnerabilities), then I do very much think there will be an electronic currency that was morphed from a failure of Bitcoin and is tied in with a government fiat system. The powers-that-be have already announced their plans. And it is very clear to me that Bitcoin has been planted with certain key design flaws that enables the takeover.
Here are the links about the plans of the powers-that-be on enforcing negative interest rates on money by locking everyone into an electronic currency and eliminating cash. You must read all the links to gain a big picture understanding and you see there was a grand plan for many years as it all fits together:
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/17/negative-interest-rates-eliminating-cash-the-summers-solution/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/18/15800/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/19/congressional-hearings-on-bitcoin/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/20/the-bitcoin-hearing/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/20/hyperinflation-all-just-hype/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/21/negative-interest-rates-coming-soon-to-a-bank-near-you/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/20/the-tree-has-been-cut-electronic-money-will-force-an-underground-economy-based-on-barter/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/27/downs-of-negative-rates-the-fed/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/22/land-of-confusion-negative-rates-may-cause-the-phase-transition-in-equites/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/24/confidence-in-the-economy-is-changing-from-public-to-private/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/27/the-2-3-trillion-nobody-mentions-about-quantitative-easing/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/23/china-the-dollar/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/15/chinas-reform-push-for-2020/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/15/china-a-new-era/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/25/can-states-go-bankrupt-are-there-exceptions-to-the-unfunded-pensions/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/25/unfunded-pensions-are-our-doom/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/15/muni-implosion/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/23/tax-revolts-and-that-309-year-cycle/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/23/real-estate-3/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/22/real-estate-collapse-or-liquidity-crisis-2015-75-2020-05/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/23/real-estate-outside-usa/www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2013/11/21/heres-why-the-philippines-economic-miracle-is-really-a-bubble-in-disguise/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/23/capital-flows-currency-flows/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/21/capital-flows-the-key-to-everything/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/21/death-always-creeps-in-from-the-periphery-of-an-organism/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/15/expect-riots-rise-of-nationalism-after-2015-75-to-pick-up-steam/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/15/rise-of-dictatorship-in-germany/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/14/merkel-rejects-referendums-in-germany/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/13/euro-germany-trade/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/14/france-economic-numbers-show-decline-3rd-quarter/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/15/us-will-pass-russia-by-2015-as-top-oil-producer/My intuition that Bitcoin was a Trojan planted (probably by the NSA at the behest of some powers-that-be) started when I noticed in Satoshi's whitepaper that he was pitching it as a better gold, because gold coin rewards continue forever. Gold's above ground supply has always increased throughout the history of man. Immediately I smelled a scam, where he was going to induce all those liberty lovers (many of whom where already looking for alternatives to fiat, such as gold and silver) to become euphoric and illogical. It was very clever marketing, because it is obvious that he realized their suspicion and better judgment would be clouded and they would not notice the vulnerabilities caused by that decision to set a hard limit of 21 million coins. The ponzi result is the most glaring result of that design decision. Then other vulnerabilities also derive from that design decision as explained below. It is so ironic that what the investors love most about Bitcoin, is precisely why it is evil. Also couple this with most of you don't understand monetary economics well. And you think that debasement is bad or somehow connected to expansive Keynesian government spending. You don't realize that the government exists to stop the hoarding of the 3% because otherwise the economy would go into gridlock (the gridlock you will see as Bitcoin reaches the tip of its ponzi bubble). Either we debase decentrally or the government does it. And when the government does it, it becomes Keynesian:
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/22/gold-can-still-be-fiat/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/21/war-on-gold/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/21/gold-to-be-or-not-to-be/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/21/hyperinflation-definition/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/21/will-electronic-money-be-deflationary/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/13/medicare-is-seizing-estates-of-anyone-over-55/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/11/crabs-in-a-bucket/http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/11/keynesianism-monetarism/But I also think Satoshi was smarter than his handlers. He hid the decentralized solution inside of a Trojan. All we have to do is change a few of the design parameters, then we eliminate the main reason government exists; we eliminate the power vacuum. And we the people win. I have a historic example of the scientists lying through their teeth to DARPA, otherwise we would not have the internet today:
World Without Web.
Satoshi appears to have done the same outsmarted his handlers at the NSA, giving us the key insights and market excitement to do the correct design.
Bitcoin vulnerabilities:
a. Massive $trillions mcap Ponzi market failure, world's governments will be forced to clawback for "public good". Because the design of the coin is to not distribute to spenders, rather to create an asset bubble with no intrinsic value because it is impossible to distribute to spenders and become a currency. The math/logic for this is in the November archive of my posts in other threads.
b. Not anonymous, very easy to identify all the users in order to tax and clawback. People are ignorant of the vulnerabilites of Tor, VPNs. Mixers are nonsense without widespread strong IP anonymity and some way to be sure spenders aren't revealing their identities to vendors, because they can be honeypotted and over time you are discovered probabilistically as the others in the mixers screw up and revealed their identities in the downstream chains of the coins. The problem of taint is huge, because if the government knows the identity of just one person in the chain of the coin's history, it can compel that person to be responsible for all activity on the coin backwards and forwards in all time, until that person reveals the identities and transactions from whom the coin was purchased and spent to.
c. Dominated by ASICs means if the world's governments (or even a few large corporations) put their combined resources into sequestering all ASIC production and ramping it up, they can easily obtain > 50% of the mining hash rate at any time. Dominated by ASICs is much more vulnerable than dominated by PCs (CPUs) if care is taken to eliminate botnets.
d. As a backup plan if the above three doesn't make it a reality sooner, the design of Bitcoin is a dearth of funding for mining as coin rewards decline. Thus either facilitating a 50 - 95% attack or if transaction fees are significant, then a
Transactions Withholding Attack takeover by cartels, especially with legal force of governments to help the cartels take form. Orthogonal to that catch-22 dilemma, my logic is that
Bitcoin's fees will spiral up thus enabling the Transactions Withholding Attack while also demotivating transactions.
e. On top of this, Bitcoin has nothing in its design which motivates pools to be small. And
I recently refuted gmaxell's claim (from the 50% attack thread in 2012) that P2Pool can't be attacked.