Not as contrarian as it sounds: more an argument that the adoption of blockchain technology, or the emergence of a large player, will drive Bitcoin to extinction.

Yet while Bitcoin has established an economy in which it’s impossible to forge transactions, it provides no defense against replication of the idea itself. No one can copy an individual bitcoin, but anyone can copy the idea of Bitcoin. So how might a government, or a corporation, or even ordinary people, go about doing so in a way that makes Bitcoin useless or redundant? Here are a few scenarios.