The only thing Bitcoin poses a threat to is the t-shirt vendors and hosting providers who are accepting it as payment. Until the Bitcoin PR campaign graduates from hacker news, it's at best an academic discussion<p>At worst, BitCoin at this point is a scam where people who got involved with it early who are sitting on lots of BitCoin need to keep up a level of interest to cash out BitCoin for coin, as the curious poke around with it.
Though I have some bitcoins out of sheer curiosity, I'm not sure they have much of a chance catching on. Has anyone actually spent much time on the BitCoin forums? It seems like the majority of users are either speculators hoping for a big payday down the road, or some level of anarchist hoping bitcoins will overthrow the government.<p>This doesn't seem like the type of community that will spearhead a mainstream currency alternative.
Presently I don't hold any Bitcoins, but I think that cryptocurrencies are an interesting development, and are quite likely to be the future of money - especially for micropayment transactions. It's entirely possible that Bitcoin may not succeed, or be subjected to various kinds of political nonsense. In general though I think cryptocurrencies are a phenomena which will persist, at least so long as their cryptographic basis remains valid.