Naviers_Stoked

Any chance you're working on a competitor to Lightroom? I'm sick of paying Adobe a subscription fee...

There's no guarantee. Bitcoin lives and dies by its merits. If people by and large don't value bitcoin's merits, it will go the way of Esperanto and the Dvorak keyboard.

One defining characteristic is that bitcoin has the capability to do things that are impossible in current financial systems. It's programmable money. And I don't mean it can simply be used by software, I mean the raw asset itself is programmable.

The centralization of financial services has some significant drawbacks. All it takes is a cursory Google search of Paypal misgivings to shed light on this, not to mention the violations of trust that banks have perpetuated in recent years.

Have a look at the Trezor

It's a hardware wallet that's essentially a small, open-source, dedicated computer tasked with storing private keys and signing transactions. It's probably the device with the best overlap of security and ease-of-use.

One thing to keep in mind is that with most technical challenges, the goal is to find a solution that's good enough. At this point, there simply isn't a viable alternative. I think this is why the overwhelming majority of cryptocurrency users, merchants, developers, markets, investments, and attention is devoted to Bitcoin.

This isn't to say that is guaranteed to remain that way, but this multi-faceted network effect at work will be a huge pain to undo.