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> Bitcoin and others will never succeed because they are too friendly towards illicit behaviour.

Bitcoin will never (fully) succeed because it's too complex for the general public.

Bitcoin will never succeed in its current form because its capabilities are limited in a number of ways by design, even if the problem of public's level of expertise goes away. One of such limitations is, even if there are subdivisions down to a "satoshi", "satoshi" level of payments are not currently (and I believe that will not ever be) possible. That is because of another limitation, that is the centralized nature of the ledger which acts as a bottleneck.

Where is the center of the ledger?

I think they're referring to the scalability problem where the number of transactions and size of the blockchain grow to a point where running a full node is prohibitively expensive and leads to a smaller number of miners verifying transactions.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/blockchain-scalability.html

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