I'm fairly on the fence of this, but I have to ask: What standard are we using for BTC's enormous momentum? Its market price? The size of its goods and services economy? The amount of processing power committed?
I'm optimistic about bitcoin because of two metrics:1. Lots of people are interested in it, all over the world.
2. There are lots of interesting, innovative projects being built around bitcoin.
It is still VERY early days, and I'll say it again: expect growing pains.
What kind if growing pains are you speaking of?
Technical growing pains like the ones we're dealing with right now-- IRC channel filling up so new people are having trouble connecting, BTC/$ going up so the 0.01BTC transaction fees are too high, etc. There will be more of these as transaction volume increases, some in the core bitcoin code and more affecting bitcoin-running websites (who will find they have to upgrade their servers to handle increased volume/users, etc).
Legal growing pains. I expect somebody doing something illegal and using bitcoins to help do it will get caught, put in jail, and that will be mis-reported as "bitcoins are illegal!" I'd say there's a 1 in 5 chance of bitcoin being made outright illegal in the USA, but I also know that I'm terrible at accurately predicting stuff.
Security growing pains. My biggest worry is what to do about non-technologically-savvy people running bitcoin on a virus-infested personal computer or mobile phone and losing all their bitcoins the first time they enter their password (I'm assuming their wallet will be password-protected) to send a couple coins to their friend.
And just plain new-technology growing pains. Expect some (maybe most) bitcoin-related companies to fail, because most startups fail. Some people will lose money when they do.
Again, I'm optimistic because there are, and will be, lots of motivated people working to solve all of these problems, and because I believe the core technology is solid. But I don't expect smooth sailing.
I'd say Gavin's been pretty spot-on.
And note that there is now an order of magnitude or two more motivated and talented people working in the bitcoin space.
And we should still expect anything but smooth sailing.
comeon guys. We are just human. And you are just a human too.
