the comparison to any utility spending technology is complete nonsense - you simply do not substitute value for a slightly better technology, imagine what level of stress it would be to change the way we exchange value every 2-3 years 
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.True but I'm not sure how quickly that level of standard gets adopted in the first place. Are we into the TCP era yet or are we back in the Appletalk/netbios frames/ipx/etc. era still?
Whatever crypto really makes it big (and it may well not be Bitcoin or Monero) will likely be dominant for decades if not longer.
I posted this in the monero economics thread. It is the best approach known to me for answering the question:
technology choice game
I want to share a different approach from the more or less empirical driven approach by risto why monero could be the special one. It is more in the tradition of evolutionary economics and game theory. I think it is quite a helpful approach to make sense of these uncertain markets and should be easy to understand even without an education as economist - I taught it to m.a. students which did not have a background in economics. probably even a guidance regarding development can be derived by it.
we need a few assumptions:
1.) the success of cryptoprotocols especially currencies is driven by network effects
2.) there is a niche for a decentralized private ledger and this niche cannot be filled by bitcoin (otherwise we could stop here)
3.) there is a competitors on the market, existent, or coming in the future
4.) the utility of a network grows with the number of participants
5.) we have two competing technologies, in this case monero and zerocash and three different agents
6.) we assume that zerocash is even superior to monero (zerocash is a placeholder for all coming superior private decentralized ledger)
7.) we assume that two agents coordinated on the inferior technology (in this case monero) get the same utility as the one coordinated on the superior technology, whereas three agents coordinated on the inferior technology get as much as two on the superior technology
8.)
T1 = Zerocash > T2= Monero
9.) utility: numerical example 1T1=2, 2T1=3 3T1=4; 1T2=1 2T2=2 3T2=3
10.) 3T1 with the utility of 4,4,4 is obviously a nash-equilibrium, what is more important is that 3T2 with 3,3,3 is a nash-equilibrium as well, in this case the utility of the network outweights the superiority of the technology
What is important to understand is that we should make very sure that we get the second agent, if we reached this stadium and the rest is relatively sound the war is won. The guidance is obviously that we need a gui to include more people of the agent 2 case. At this point there is no serious competitor, but this will probably change in the future. We do not need to be feared as long as we manage to get agent 2.
This illustration also shows why bitcoiners do not need to be feared of any altcoins - the war over the transparent ledger is won.
The weaknesses of this approach are obviously its simplifications - how do we measure utility of privacy etc. pp, but as an illustration, I guess it is sound
I want to share a different approach from the more or less empirical driven approach by risto why monero could be the special one. It is more in the tradition of evolutionary economics and game theory. I think it is quite a helpful approach to make sense of these uncertain markets and should be easy to understand even without an education as economist - I taught it to m.a. students which did not have a background in economics. probably even a guidance regarding development can be derived by it.
we need a few assumptions:
1.) the success of cryptoprotocols especially currencies is driven by network effects
2.) there is a niche for a decentralized private ledger and this niche cannot be filled by bitcoin (otherwise we could stop here)
3.) there is a competitors on the market, existent, or coming in the future
4.) the utility of a network grows with the number of participants
5.) we have two competing technologies, in this case monero and zerocash and three different agents
6.) we assume that zerocash is even superior to monero (zerocash is a placeholder for all coming superior private decentralized ledger)
7.) we assume that two agents coordinated on the inferior technology (in this case monero) get the same utility as the one coordinated on the superior technology, whereas three agents coordinated on the inferior technology get as much as two on the superior technology
8.)
T1 = Zerocash > T2= Monero
9.) utility: numerical example 1T1=2, 2T1=3 3T1=4; 1T2=1 2T2=2 3T2=3
10.) 3T1 with the utility of 4,4,4 is obviously a nash-equilibrium, what is more important is that 3T2 with 3,3,3 is a nash-equilibrium as well, in this case the utility of the network outweights the superiority of the technology
What is important to understand is that we should make very sure that we get the second agent, if we reached this stadium and the rest is relatively sound the war is won. The guidance is obviously that we need a gui to include more people of the agent 2 case. At this point there is no serious competitor, but this will probably change in the future. We do not need to be feared as long as we manage to get agent 2.
This illustration also shows why bitcoiners do not need to be feared of any altcoins - the war over the transparent ledger is won.
The weaknesses of this approach are obviously its simplifications - how do we measure utility of privacy etc. pp, but as an illustration, I guess it is sound
for bitcoin as well as monero user 2 is obviously the most important. it is a question of definition who user 2 is - but it is definetely not the same person in btc as it is in xmr.