This assumes technology moves like molasses, which is in fact...not reality. Crypto currency is now on the map and Bitcoin can easily get left behind by another crypto currency. So, your devotion to the name "Bitcoin" is I guess, similar to my devotion to my country. Although, my country will be here long after Bitcoin is dead, as will the US dollar remain the most popular currency on the planet. Hey, maybe the USG will create the crypto form of the US dollar just to ward off the little wannabes.
Something could come along that's better than Bitcoin but I happen to think that based on the Bitcoin design, that would be a very hard thing to do. Many of the alt-coins are based on some very odd beliefs about reality and economics (some of which happen to be mainstream but that will just allow their notions to be proven fallacious in a free market). Bitcoin has it's issues right now but most of those are pretty easily solvable. There's no need to run a full client, just look at Bitcoinspinner for example. Payment addresses add a lot of complexity at the moment but that can fairly trivially be solved by mapping email addresses or domain names to public keys. In fact it would be fairly trivial to write an app which would allow you to enter an email address and an amount of bitcoins and the bitcoins be stored in a temporary wallet to be collected by the recipient at their leisure (if this hasn't been done already).
Many Bitcoin issues stem from the fact that it's simply not big enough yet to make it worthwhile to have the kind of infrastructure that it will eventually need. That doesn't mean it won't be there. Some of us remember no Paypal, no Ebay and Amazon just sold books and Archie and Gopher were not just footnotes.
These are really good points and I don't necessarily disagree. I'm not writing Bitcoin's obituary yet, but times are changing faster than Bitcoin developers can keep up, it would seem. I mean, the diehards who have been mining since the beginning should be sitting on 100's of millions of dollars at todays prices. It's really hard to make the legitimate argument that it's still "not big enough", to make the changes and updates the mainstream demands, when you're sitting on that kind of cash. How much "bigger" does it need to get?
What I think is the diehards are lazy. They made their money and they're content just ridding this thing our as is. That's fine but it will soon be old news if this thinking and lack of action continues. My opinions of course.
BTW-I remember pre-internet. Life before pagers. I remember the first fax machine commercial that ever came on TV talking about how you could send a piece of paper from one place to another. WOW! And...I still remember connecting my Atari to the back of a console tv, using a screw driver.
Yeah, that's right. People are really trying hard. Almost everyday you have at least one thread on reddit about new offline wallets, generators or whatever. I'm still waiting for something revolutionary. Ref thin clients: check out