I cannot see how anyone is going to be able to stop this.
One idea off the top of my head: Second hacking of Mt. Gox causes massive loss of confidence in Bitcoin, general sell-off. Last few holdouts cling to currency in belief it will recover, but essentially lose their investment. Becomes a curious footnote in history along with Virtual Boy.
Another: Take-up by retailers too slow, people get fed up holding on to their Bitcoins waiting for them to be more valuable, mass sell-off.
A third: Fundamental weakness found in entropic source used for RSA key generation in the default client, private keys turn out to be discoverable in useful time, entire system crumbles.
I can probably come up with more.
Yeah, but the thing is once you've opened the door to cryptocurrencies they won't die. It's open source so they will keep evolving now. You've seen yourself the enthusiasm bitcoins have sparked. That enthusiasm is an enormous motivator for open source coders to excel in developing the code. Mt. Gox is just a trading outpost, strictly speaking it's not even required - you can just meet up with someone and trade cash for bitcoins.
It's a self-developing system now and the natural next step in the evolution of the internet. This time it's real.
