But to compare it to Digicash and Beenz really shows that you haven't done your homework. Probably a lot like predicting "the dot-com crash over the last Decade". (That would have been a little more impressive if done in 1998, and not over the last decade.)
Look at the dates on Downside.com's "deathwatch". Deathwatch ran from 2000-2001, starting at the peak of the dot-com boom. We predicted the crash when others were hyping the boom.
Bitcoin is going to get more attention primarily because it has solved a problem that has never been solved before - Beenz and Digicash didn't solve it. Paypal and Mastercard didn't solve it. Cash doesn't solve it. Bitcoin has a very clever solution to a very difficult problem. And it's the first to solve it. So Bitcoin is going to get attention. And with attention comes investment. And with investment comes a rise in value. As long as Bitcoin continues to GROW in the attention it gets, chances are good that people will try to figure out how to invest in it. And to see that there were only 61,000 accounts in the Mt. Gox leaked database, that shows how truly tiny the Bitcoin community is. In fact, there were less than 10,000 prior to May 15th or so.
Digicash came close. They had an anonymous digital currency. The technology was good enough. but David Chaum, who owned the technology, botched several potential big deals, including ones with Microsoft and Visa.
How issuance of a digital currency should work isn't clear. Digicash and Beenz were centralized. Bitcoin is based on compute work, with a heavy bias towards early adopters. That doesn't seem to be leading to wide adoption as a transactional medium. Beenz got much further in adoption, and it tanked. If coins were somehow generated by doing
useful work, that would be better.
Currency speculation isn't the best way to make money in Bitcoin. Building the infrastructure is. (There's a reason why the remnants of the Gold Rush of 1849 are Wells Fargo and Levis Jeans.
Ah, the Big Four. Huntington (hardware), Stanford (railroads), Hopkins (hardware), and Crocker (iron). The real remnant of the Gold Rush is the Southern Pacific Railroad.
There's something to be said for that.
The experience of PayPal is significant. PayPal is all infrastructure. PayPal is really a security company. They started by building authentication tokens. Money transfer came later. Most of what PayPal does is deal with security problems. Processing a successful transaction is very cheap. Dealing with trouble requires call centers, investigators, and substantial automated systems looking for fraud. PayPal originally offered peer to peer transfers, but the security problems associated with that were too great.
The Mt. Gox debacle indicates the same may be true for Bitcoin.
If Bitcoin reaches Paypal's level of success in a decade, then you can do the math - there's a limited number of Bitcoins, and that number needs to support the sort of environment that Paypal supports. So that means they will be worth over $100 in about 7.5 years. Not thousands. Not mllions. But between $100 and $200.
August 16, 2001: "If you've earned any Beenz on your travels around the Web, you'd better hurry up and spend them." "Internet surfers have only 10 days to use up their Beenz after the company announced Thursday that its online operations will cease Aug. 26. Any outstanding Beenz will be worthless after that date. A short message on the Beenz Web site announced the close and said any Beenz in a member's account after Aug. 26 "will be invalidated by Beenz.com, and the member will not be entitled to any compensation of any kind for such invalidated Beenz."
Although Bitcoin is distributed as to generation and transfer, it's centralized as to exchanges. A sizable level of activity is required for an exchange to have market depth. So there's a network effect which tends to keep the number of exchanges down. (Yes, potentially there could be a combined ticker and a consolidated limit order book. Those only work when there's a separation between brokers and exchanges.) So, if Bitcoin winds down, it will be because it becomes illiquid.
. 
