The mining system provides the block chain that verifies transactions; yes. And eventually the payoff to miners becomes dominated by transaction fees rather than by payouts for finding blocks.
One of my concerns with Bitcoin is that today, on the margin, choosing to accept BTC in exchange for goods means agreeing to give lots of goods, on demand, to the people who currently are sitting on a lot of BTC — who have not (on the whole) done anything particularly useful to earn that wealth. Even a merchant who thinks a Bitcoin-like system is a good idea may be reluctant to agree to participate in making a bunch of nerds with video cards very, very rich.
Even a merchant who thinks a Bitcoin-like system is a good idea may be reluctant to agree to participate in making a bunch of nerds with video cards very, very rich.
I don't think the merchants really care about that. They care about make themselves rich. If making nerds with video cards also rich is a side effect, so be it. But if nerds with video cards can dilute the value of their currency, they may have a problem. If this dilution occurs on a known schedule and will slow down over time and eventually stop altogether, and competing currencies can be diluted at any time by central bankers, it may not be much of a problem.
Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Monthly threads popped up around the same time a pricing bubble brought mainstream attention last year. When the bubble popped, and price continued to deflate, discussion on this site stopped entirely. Was there a change of sign in the social status of the topic, is the topic fully explored, or has there simply happened nothing of interest over the last year?
If you are not familiar with Bitcoin, here is one intro I happen to like.
Kaj Sotala lists a number of previous threads on the topic:
Less Wrong seems like a good place to discuss recent developments, if one does not want to suffer the inanity of the officially unofficial forum. If you are not longer interested in Bitcoin, perhaps send your remaining balance to the Singularity Institute?