And at base, economically, Bitcoin is just a set of UTXOs and private keys controling them - i.e., a ledger - a record of who provided value to whom and who had more insight, foresight, and strength of conviction forged in the fires of gigantic surges and crashes over the years, distilled and rarefied through an endless parade of altcoin distractions, technical scares, and schemes like Pirateat40 Bitcoinica, and ASICMiner coaxing away people's coins.
@cypherdoc's aphorism "most people will lose money in this space" functions as an ever-intensifying Great Filter, a crucible out of which a mature economy is formed where the pork has been trimmed off and only the most efficient, most insightful, most prescient, most economically literate, most positively imperturbable investors survive. These make the most effective stewards of the ledger going forward, naturally representing the entire array of disciplines necessary for full understanding of Bitcoin.
Far from being a merely arbitrary distribution of wealth, the ledger as it stands is thus incredibly valuable compared to a clean slate, and even if people like Anonymint are right that Bitcoin is "irredeemably doomed bloatware spaghetti code that can never scale," an entirely new protocol can take over the ledger maintenance function if need be. If the current protocol flounders and somehow cannot be fixed, economic pressure builds for any "altcoin" to be released as a spinoff using the Bitcoin ledger, since a huge functioning economy would be on board with it from Day 1.
This is why I'm not worried about the future. My only concern is the short term, because I would really like to see a surge above the all-time high within the next few months to end the two-year bear market.
