Anyone who thought the Chinese government were going to ignore a mechanism that allowed people to bypass capital controls with impunity was pretty naive.

Bitcoin fanboys have classic tunnel vision - they're so enamoured of the libertarian ideal of an anonymous crypto-currency that's not controlled by any government, that they ignored all the practical, economic and legal challenges it would need to overcome before it could become a real currency.

It's a bit like the people who watched the moon landings on TV and believed that we'd have moonbases by the end of the 20th century. Technology needs time to develop and mature, and there typically needs to be a compelling commercial case for its adoption.

The technological principles that underpin Bitcoin will see more widespread adoption within the next few years but they'll be deployed within the pre-existing financial context, perhaps as a mechanism for OTC trading or to support real-time gross settlement in the wholesale markets. In the retail market, I envisage an M-Pesa-style digital payments/money-transfer solution that complements the the traditional banking and payments systems. We might see alternative currencies built on Bitcoin-style infrastructures but based on something that people value in a different way from dollars and cents (e.g. the rainforest).

But Bitcoin itself is too flawed from an economic perspective, too inefficient and too big a step to be able to function effectively as a currency within the current AML/sanctions-focused regulatory environment.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2013-12-17/01139011174.shtml#4832...

That's the big question isn't it? Will bitcoin take over, or will another digital cryptocurrency conjured out of the ether take over? (bitcoin 2.0)

> So there is 0.003 bitcoin per person.

There's some bitcoin amounts that are likely lost forever, perhaps miners that lost their private keys or whatever, or forgot about their bitcoin wallet from the early days, which will skew the calculations and make the effective total less than 21 million. Also, as others have noted, you are likely to see inequality with bitcoin wealth, just like regular assets and currencies.

There are 7 billion people.

So there is 0.003 bitcoin per person.

So if bitcoin will one day become "THE" currency, isn't it more than logical that 1BTC will become worth more than a million dollars or something like that (not that dollars would still exist at that time, but, 1BTC would be worth as much as an average group of 333 people owns)?

Or am I misunderstanding something about currency?

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses does not look bearish to me