I think that's quite a plausible future for Bitcoin, though I find it hard to give an estimate of likelihood and of the relative relevance that Bitcoin will have.
The next-most plausible (though I think much less likely) future is that the hype will die down, there will be widespread disappointment, and it will turn into a kind of ghost town.
One big problem of Bitcoin is that in terms of efficiency, pretty much any centralized service can beat the shit out of it. If you think of Bitcoin as a ledger, and then look at the amount of resources spent on maintaining that ledger, and compare it to the amount of resources required to run a simple centralized ledger... well, Bitcoin loses big time.
This means that whenever Bitcoin comes close to having a large mindshare for everyday internet transaction, there is a serious window of opportunity for non-Bitcoin startups to take its place.
The only market where this logic doesn't apply is the Silkroad-type market and the stuff that caters to gold-bug/libertarian ideologists.
I agree with you that Bitcoin is an expensive ledger to maintain. That said, it's nonsense to say that low transaction costs (that's what efficiency means to the end user) is the sole factor for anyone besides Silkroad users and ideologists.
People pay a lot for security, and the problem with centralized systems is that they grant the organization running them both the means and incentives all the rents it can get away with, not only directly with added fees, but by using abusive tactics to pass the costs of fraud onto the user (see PayPal's infamous freezing policy) and by skimping security as much as it can.
Of course, you can reduce the likelihood of such events by adding external auditing, insurance, regulation, etc, but all of that adds friction which will inevitability result in increased transaction costs (TANSTAAFL).
If risk was irrelevant, nobody would invest in treasury bonds.
On a related note: It boggles my mind when people bring up Bitcoin as a way of doing distributed work, it is nearly the exact opposite of how you would want to do distributed work, increasing the duplicated workload tremendously.
The next-most plausible (though I think much less likely) future is that the hype will die down, there will be widespread disappointment, and it will turn into a kind of ghost town.
One big problem of Bitcoin is that in terms of efficiency, pretty much any centralized service can beat the shit out of it. If you think of Bitcoin as a ledger, and then look at the amount of resources spent on maintaining that ledger, and compare it to the amount of resources required to run a simple centralized ledger... well, Bitcoin loses big time.
This means that whenever Bitcoin comes close to having a large mindshare for everyday internet transaction, there is a serious window of opportunity for non-Bitcoin startups to take its place.
The only market where this logic doesn't apply is the Silkroad-type market and the stuff that caters to gold-bug/libertarian ideologists.