Bitcoin has already has more than 3 strikes against it. The only thing it has going is that it is very well designed, crowd-sourced by smart people. It is an experiment to find out if design alone if enough.

Anyone who has even so much as looked at a branded product can tell you that the single most important marketing decision you’ll ever make is your name. Does Bitcoin have a good name? I dunno, but with a primary moneychanger like “Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange”, they might as well be called gold pieces or galactic credits. “I’m thinking about blowing some cartel coins on galactic credits during double XP weekend . . . and maybe saving for retirement.” It’s all the same schema.

Despite the androgynous voice-over ads for vanilla-flavored wish-fulfillment, banking is just one generation removed from the image of stogy old white guys with lists containing (a) names and (b) numbers. Also, cash in a vault. Maybe put the list in there too, you know, at night. Folks expect that beyond the starbucks/lobby, that guy’s still back there, somewhere, minding the store while the teller’s watching pr0n.

They want John Houseman for their banker, not Chuck E. Cheese.

The other big challenge is that no one knows the answer to, how will governments react? There’s a lot of thought that bitcoin will be a huge threat to existing tax systems or existing ways governments have of controlling currency flows across their border. I personally think governments will do what governments have always done: they will adapt.

There’s something else that “governments have always done”… kill the competition. For your sake, Gavin, and for ours I hope you are right.

In what sense of “vulnerable”?