I hadn't really considered that; I was only vaguely aware it was possible. Yes, that's a problem.
I'm inclined to think of Bitcoin as the beta for widespread adoption of cryptocurrency. It has some issues, including this one that mean it will probably never be what most people use for everyday money. Whatever succeeds it and eventually assumes that role will avoid those problems.
I don't think there is a problem with the way bitcoin works. The majority of miners, i.e. the people who actually have invested the money to run the network, decide what software to run, and therefore what bitcoin is.
Bitcoin depends entirely on the self-interest of the involved parties to not destroy the system they have invested so much in. That's how much of the real world works too.
Well, I'm not saying bitcoin is perfect or fit for mainstream usage for that matter, but for what is worth, that is bound to happen with anything digital. Security data breaches are a recurring problem for internet companies and services too.
I don't see it as a significant problem. Those hurdles only need to be crossed for folks using Bitcoin to do so safely. If they are not crossed, it's only Bitcoin users that are harmed. Since there is nothing to force anyone to use it, all possible harm arising from weaknesses in the underlying infrastructure is opt-in.
Yes, that is the primary concern. "We" in the bitcoin community haven't yet figured out how to write 100% correct alternative implementations of bitcoin. We will have to figure out how to do that first before I would ever recommend anybody actually run an alternative implementation as a full node and rely on it for seeing the blockchain.
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