Bitcoin offers lots of benefits to users: it's fast, borderless, decentralized and anonymous (though some privacy can be sacrificed for greater convenience). But what are its drawbacks? For one thing, bitcoins have no intrinsic value—unlike gold coins which people could use for jewelry in ancient civilizations when they were too valuable to trade with each other directly. Gold has some industrial uses today but that’s not why we want it now—we want it because people throughout history have found it valuable to exchange for goods or services. Paper money is another good example: when we put a dollar bill in a shoebox and don a pair of nostalgia-tinted glasses, its value as "money" has little to do with what the cash can purchase right now.
If bitcoins are only valuable when exchanged for other currencies or products, how does the Bitcoin network promote anything like intrinsic value? The answer is that there’s no such thing—Bitcoins are always worth something because they're useful and desirable, but that usefulness and desirability change over time as information technology advances, government regulations shift, competing crypto-currencies arise, etc.
Pros of Bitcoin as a currency
Cons of Bitcoin as a currency
The future of bitcoin will probably be determined by government regulations. If these increase to a point where people are no longer able to use Bitcoin, then the future of bitcoin will be grim. There will still always be some people using bitcoin for transactions and they will continue investing in it because it is decentralized and anonymous. Maybe if enough people start losing interest in using bitcoin for transactions, or if governments begin regulating bitcoin, then the value of bitcoin may go down.