I've been reading about Bitcoin for a couple of days (OK, not continuously); my primary concern is scalability. Yes, I've read about that as well.
I just doubled the number of my concerns:
forking.
I personally don't think there is much to worry about here. There have been a lot of these 'forks'. Most of them are obvious scams to make the early adopters rich.
I looked at Litecoin a few days ago. It seems (to me) to be on the up-n-up and an honest attempt to solve some of the deficiencies of Bitcoin, but it also seemed to me as though it suffered even more severely from the scaling things that bothers me about Bitcoin.
My dream is that a
lot of 'forks' (which I don't consider 'forks' in the strictest sense of the word) pop up and derive their strength from being backed by reserves from Bitcoin (aka what I would term the 'satoshi block-chain'.) These could have additions like the potential for claw-back (if the recipient screwed you), a built in ratings system, etc, etc. There are an endless number of interesting things one could do.
The point would be to both provide better alternatives for different kinds of end-use AND to strengthen Bitcoin by reducing the load and creating demand and the potential to deploy BTC in ways which are agreeable to the holder. That is, by backing a currency which has goals that one believes in.
To me, the most compelling aspect of Bitcoin is the miracle that it is within fairly easy grasp of most people to run the full block-chain. When that is no longer the case, I really have some concerns about the system. I would hope that if it could serve primarily as a 'reserve currency', the life span of it's serviceability on normal hardware and networks could be significantly extended.
