The risk of a vastly superior design would be unlikely to collapse bitcoin, because stakeholders still likely consider their bitcoins to have value -- and that's the fundamental underpinnings of any currency including bitcoin, shared idea of value.
I'm not sure I agree with this, unless you mean that the stakeholders will likely still consider their bitcoins to have value
temporarily. However, if it is well known, even amongst stakeholders, that a superior currency exists they will gradually migrate towards it (even if they tell each other otherwise). Therefore, in the long run (could be days/weeks/years) bitcoins would become worthless, it might just be more orderly and gradual than instantaneous, but ultimately someone will be stuck with a bunch of worthless data (no offense to Satoshi and the devs). And I'm just pointing out that this is not the case with a physical currency/commodity like gold. Even if the entire world abandoned gold as a marketable commodity, the person left holding all the gold could still use the gold for something. Gold still has a, albeit limited, use value even in the absence of an exchange value. I can't come up with a use value for bitcoins if there is no exchange value.
It is more likely that a sudden bitcoin collapse could be triggered by a software flaw that permits trivial minting / generating / copying of bitcoins.
I agree that this is the more likely scenario, at least in the short run. So does this mean that by investing in bitcoins, we are basically betting on our collective ability to write bug and exploit free software?
