Reasons to be cheerful, part 1 (long-term bitcoin analysis)

Why I think bitcoin will fail:

• mining is just unethical, using huge amounts of power for a pointless activity - which will only increase in its demand as bitcoin increases in value

• it is not a centralised community, as most miners pool together and countries like China own a large portion of mines

• a split community which can't come to agreements and has shown itself to be untrustworthy (antbleed) - coupled with a large bitcoin transaction waiting time (bitcoin is slow)

• the blockchain is hackable and with an increase in computing power may become even more so

• other crypto currencies can learn from bitcoin and implement better platforms

• governments may heavily influence it through legislation, fiat, and ownership. Chinese government has quite a good grip on it. If it begins to undermine powerful governments it could quickly be criminalised

• much bitcoin has already been mined, making in increasingly less interesting to investors (over-time)

• bitcoin price is largely driven by investors not by real world use or value

• bitcoin lost its crypto dominance today

• bitcoin transactions are both traceable and anonymous. Depending on what you want - security - privacy - bitcoin doesn't really do either very well

I don't want it to, but I think it will fail. As for crypt-currency bitcoin has trail blazed and given us reasons to be cheerful.

My own opinion is that bitcoin, eth and ripple will all fail to be the emerging leaders of bitcoin - any suggestions on what might be the emerging winners?