Bitcoins were designed to be – and, in many ways, are – the perfect digital currency: they’re frictionless, anonymous, and cryptographically astonishingly secure. For anybody who’s ever suffered the incompetence of a bank, or bristled at the fees involved in just spending money, either domestically or abroad – that is to say, for all of us – the promise of bitcoin is the holy grail of payments. Especially since, to all intents and purposes, bitcoins are invisible to law enforcement and the taxman.

Those strengths are also weaknesses. No one wants to risk losing millions of dollars worth of currency overnight, just because they were outsmarted by some computer hacker.

Chances are that governments will want to control monetary policy "manually" (politically), as opposed to let math do the decisions for them.

That would mean for governments to give up the crucially important power to willfully control wealth distribution.

I see this part by far the biggest hurdle in the future of Bitcoin.

Although the political slogan in all developed countries is "free market economy" - it is only free, as long as the political elite is free to set the rules. Including monetary policies.

The technical ingenuity of Bitcoin is that it is a platform, that allows to bypass this nation state government power and control, by connecting citizens directly, anywhere around the globe to vote about the price of a mutually accepted, therefore existing currency, that they can use among each other to trade goods and services - purely on the value that is determined across the globe, real time, by them, the participating individual citizens.

The implication of this is hard to overestimate.

Bitcoin is the first mover in the market and there is no reason to believe that Bitcoin will not be a leader over the next decade because the growth of this market has inherent positive feed-back loops.

As the market grows in size the developers who believe in the durability of Bitcoin in the long term have more funds, and time to invest in technological improvements.