A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail
I think Bitcoin's doomed to fail, but not for the reasons the article suggest.<p>There're ample historical counterexamples of currencies that are <i>not</i> tied to a government.  Gold is the most obvious example; if currency was inextricably tied to governments, there would not have been a mad rush to colonize the New World (and extract its gold reserves).  In prisons cigarettes frequently serve as currency, as a medium of exchange that is widely valued.<p>What really makes a currency is <i>confidence</i>.  People have to believe that other people will continue to value the currency later.  Government backing can provide one source of confidence.  But so can strong crypto, and one could argue that these days people have more confidence in crypto than in governments.<p>What'll really kill Bitcoin is that this speculative wave has made the price incredibly volatile, so volatile that real merchants selling real goods have no idea what to price things at.  So everyone holding Bitcoins purchases them for investment value, and then the price will crash when it stops going up.  That destroys confidence in the currency, which destroys the currency.<p>I could easily see a successor currency based on the Bitcoin protocol emerging from the ashes, though.  By then the speculators will have been burned so badly that they'll stay far away, so it'll quietly gain adoption in the background, and then eventually become the new currency of choice when inflation starts to make it's way through current fiat currencies.