"Ignore"? Maybe I didn't ignore that particular failure mode, but didn't ever consider it? Or I was going to mention it but forgot? Or have considered it before

"Ignore"? Maybe I didn't ignore that particular failure mode, but didn't ever consider it? Or I was going to mention it but forgot? Or have considered it before and concluded it's not worth reexamining, hence it wouldn't occur to me to reconsider it for my comment? The third option is the case here. I didn't think about it again for my comment and then decide to ignore it. A better verb would be "omit". But let's briefly reexamine it again... What does happen to bitcoin if no one spends it? Well it probably goes to a value of $0. Is this a hard inference? That makes your comment kind of reduce to "you ignored the problem of what happens if bitcoin dies." If it dies, your coins are worthless. Duh? In reality we see people are spending bitcoins so there is presently some sort of incentive to spend, so maybe the problem isn't the lack of incentive to spend itself, but whatever causes that lack of incentive to spend in the first place, and that cause cannot be currently at work because currently there is incentive to spend. So the cause cannot merely be "deflation", as that's already happening. A future cause could be hyper-deflation, but then I'll ask you what happens to the USD in hyper-inflation... A more general thing to look at is the incentive to use bitcoin and ask whether bitcoin is useful. Bitcoin is more than just a currency, it's also a set of tools for making transactions. If bitcoin isn't useful, there's no incentive to spend or hoard it. Presently I think bitcoin is useful; bitcoin has the pretty cool feature of being able to pseudonymously send an arbitrary amount of money from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world, instantly, without reliance on a single third party. And the stuff highlighted on https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts and elsewhere for future applications that the core infrastructure is more or less ready to handle is very cool. And there are items or experiences one can acquire with bitcoin that are difficult to acquire with traditional currencies and financial systems. All of these features are subject to competition. The US government could make drugs and online gambling legal and vendors could make such items and experiences easy to acquire with USD, Visa et al. could stop charging their array of fees (at least with bitcoin the only fees are small not-percentage-based transaction fees and currency exchange fees that are typically less than credit card processing percentages), PayPal could get better, etc. The many ways in which bitcoin could die due to better competition make that threat much more interesting and plausible to consider and wonder whether bitcoin could keep up or would die immediately as the case would be for "what if it dies because no one spends it anymore?". Edit: Admittedly a more interesting question can be "what's likely for the future of bitcoin when considering the ratio between people who find bitcoin useful for its features vs. people who just find it useful as a way to get more USD?" If this was what you really meant to highlight, I'm sorry for misinterpreting.