There are barriers to entry, such as laws; Bitcoin simply ignores them. Without real merchants, Bitcoin is useless to me no matter how fast it innovates. And even if it were useful, it's still [going to be] illegal.
This is much larger than the US only. Even when USD-nominated mobile payment would finally be introduced in the US, it will be a long time before it is accepted in other countries, especially emerging economies.
Also, merchants don't have to jump through any of the bank's hoops to accept Bitcoin.
A grassroots initiative like this can allow for global, low-cost, payments from your mobile phone, without needing to wait for slow banking innovation.
Right, it is still not a given that it will succeed, but it's much to early to dismiss it...
It's distributed so it's probably hard to kill. Unless your the NSA or CIA and have tons of computing power with which you can just flood the market with rendering everyone else's bitcoins useless...
Seriously though, it seems like Bitcoin is really vulnerable to this sort of attack, no matter what "hardening" features are builtin to make mining harder. NSA can spend a week and kill it all off. Is there a way to block whole hash blocks that the NSA or someone else who might have a large chunk of the bitcoin market?
Still I wouldn't write it off so quick, it's the branding/legitimacy question along with traction among merchants and usd<->bitcoin that's holding it back right now.
There are barriers to entry, such as laws; Bitcoin simply ignores them. Without real merchants, Bitcoin is useless to me no matter how fast it innovates. And even if it were useful, it's still [going to be] illegal.