As a purely digital currency, you require computing power to create and check the integrity of Bitcoins, and you need the Internet to widely distribute the registry of Bitcoins and to record transactions so if you're talking about going long term without electricity or Internet, then you're correct, Bitcoin is out.



That's a very difficult question to answer. I would be very, very surprised if Bitcoin were still around 40 years from now. I see it more as an example to everyone of what digital currency can be.



The outstanding number of Bitcoins is still small enough that buying or selling large amounts of Bitcoins can have dramatic influence on the price. I have no idea at what number of Bitcoins would help dampen these price swings. But even Blue Chip stocks can vary in price quite a bit even over the course of one day.

A huge Achilles heel for Bitcoin has been the quality of the Bitcoin exchanges and Bitcoin digital wallets to store them. There have been some high profile and costly thefts that have given a huge black eye to the whole Bitcoin concept. Probably the most high profile Bitcoin exchange, Mt Gox in Japan, just went bankrupt and shut down, taking many people's Bitcoins down with them. Mark R linked to an article that mentions the downfall of Mt Gox and how these incidents really knock down the price of Bitcoin in a hurry. Until a more mature, robust infrastructure develops to support Bitcoin, it's still really the Wild West in the Bitcoin world now. As the saying goes, "You pays your money and you takes your chances." But things mature very quickly in the online world, so the situation could stabilize quite quickly.



Well, it depends on how you view Bitcoin's role. If someone is interested in Bitcoin as a store of value or as an investment in itself, then think of it like how you would think of gold. As interest in gold increases, the price per ounce will go up and up. What used to be worth $200 near the peak of the Dot Com bubble could later be worth $1,800 for the same ounce of gold. But I don't think there's any chance that people will be trading in Bitcoin like that 40 years from now.

However, if you view Bitcoin as a widely used medium of exchange throughout the whole country, then maybe 21 million Bitcoins is too small a number to work efficiently in that role, even allowing for fractional Bitcoins. Pricing a pack of gum as 0.00000001 Bitcoin does not seem like something people will readily embrace.