First of all, despite the previous disclaimer, let me clarify that Bitcoin is a hughe phenomenon, a true technical breaktrhough that could have only been invented by a true mastermind. One only needs to read Satoshi Nakamoto's paper to see that (and I am not going to deal with the origin or what the intentions of this Bourbaki of the cryptoeconomy might be).
Having said that, I see important flaws in using Bitcoin as a means of online payment (this does not apply to hand-to-hand business): It's reversability. Bitcoin is non-reversible by design, so that if you receive goods that are broken, are not as described, or any other usual (really, really common) problems that you may encounter when buying goods online, you are left all alone. Granted we would have the opposite problem if it was freely reversible: rogue buyers would reverse payments once goods left sellers' facilities. This leaves nothing but the classical third party arbitrage, some kind of escrow system. In case of the current Bitcoin system, imagine that you buy something on AliExpress. People who have will know what I mean. AliExpress is kind of a Chinese ebay, but only direct selling, no auctions. Chinese vendors sell their product, the same (crappy or not) that you can find in your large retailer chain, but for much less. Buy something cheap, receive it at home within 15-60 days. This sounds great, but you need to account for a lot of problems inherent to that scheme: Firstly, you need to know that AliExpress escrow system is worried only about products reaching their destination. Once you get your item, AliExpress urges you to verify that you received it. If you get something broken, they do not automatically honor their returns policy, but involve you in an extenuating, long, and in most cases, infructiferous process of getting your money back. In that case, you totally depend on the seller. Even if the seller has a good reputation, you need to deal with China post (or your local post office for that matter):
Imagine, for a moment, that you buy a nice Xiaomi Red Rice, customized, banded Android, quad core cell phone from a Chinese seller for about USD 200 in Bitcoin. It was maybe the seller, or maybe China Post, but the cellphone is broken. You depend on the seller's good will more than buying in AliExpress (and that is a lot to say) since he has to send you the funds willingly. You cannot revert the transaction. If you do this operation with a VISA credit card, it takes a call to your bank or to VISA to have it cancelled. And when you get your package from the mailman with all the illustion only to find out that you got a brick, having the possibility of reverting the transaction is, as Mastercard says, priceless.
This is a major problem for transactions in Bitcoin. But it is not the main problem to become a de facto payment system (de iure, governments could outright forbid its use). The main problem is its duplicability. In fact, Litecoin is already an accepted system, as much as Bitcoin is. There is a large number of so-called altcoins (even scam-coins). They are all (except some details such as encryption used) equivalent. So we have a problem of unicity. In case of gold, it is only the 79-th element in the periodic table, it is the only element that provides desirable properties of money. None other is gold. Bitcoin can be duplicated to give the exact service or better. The fact that it was the first coin with this system does not give it more desirable monetary properties. They can be collectionism properties, or something else, and it has certainly value, but they are not monetary at all.
If I have made such an attack on Bitcoin (and altcoin), then why do I say that it is a revolutionary idea? Because this can be the money of the future provided: an escrow system (banks that might charge for that, it is a service after all) and laws designating any of the altcoins as the one to use, grating one system unicity and yielding all properties of money. Absent that, Bitcoin, or any other alt-coin, is a tulip, with only the people's desire to have this or that coin as the only driver of value (or is it prive in USD?).
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