I was really surprised that the announcement that Steam may support Bitcoin made waves a while ago, yet the announcement that it actually does did not.
I used it to buy a (horrible) game last night, and it worked beautifully. Contrast with PayPal, with which Steam is always confused about where I am and whether it should charge me in GBP or EUR. I'm never not using Bitcoin again.
What about refunds? With Paypal you know you're getting the same amount back, in the same currency, as if you haven't bought anything at all. Given the fluctuating nature of Bitcoin, surely that's not possible?
There is talk that the playing field will become more level now that the ASICs have catched up with 14 nanometer process technology. Mining equipment should no longer become obsolete every few months.
Aren't there a small group of people who essentially control all of Bitcoin with no oversight? There might be a group of 30 very wealthy early adopters, miners, main developers, people who own the communication channels, and other influencers, who have 90% of the influence in what happens with Bitcoin. Real currencies can't boast to being that centralised.
Their wealth depends on bitcoin keeping the properties it currently has. For instance they could try to merge a code change that doubles the balances for early adopters, but it would immediately destroy their wealth because people would stop using the currency.
Bitcoin is the natural currency of the deep web not a replacement of the finance sector.
It doesn't matter if it dies or not while the users of these technologies [slowly] grow and new innovations appear. Currently Bitcoin is the leader but the core concepts around cryptocurrencies/blockchain are the most important part.