Quote from: luigi1111 on July 09, 2015, 11:04:12 PM

Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on July 09, 2015, 10:38:18 PM

Quote from: luigi1111 on July 09, 2015, 10:17:10 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on July 09, 2015, 10:04:47 PM

if i have to migrate to a new chain and lose money doing it, i'm done with crypto.

If you see the event ahead of time (and act on it), you'd likely make an enormous amount of money rather than losing.

No, because the principle would be dead. You'd forever have to be an investor, hopping from coin to coin. No reliability as a store of value. That's why it won't happen. Altcoins (meaning alt-ledgers, not alt-protocols) are a fundamentally self-defeating idea, except in catastrophic backup scenarios and as testnets. The window to market an altcoin to a new audience unfamiliar with Bitcoin - so that it wouldn't be an altcoin from those new people's perspective - has mostly closed, making it truly self-defeating as a long-term investment proposition.

Now alt-protocols are different, as they can be pasted on to Bitcoin's ledger via the spinoff method; maintaining Bitcoin's ledger just like a sidechain would try to. If Litecoin, for example, turns out to be better and there's somehow no way to incorporate its better ideas into the Bitcoin protocol, LTC will not be what rises; instead a spinoff of Litecoin will administer Bitcoin's ledger and BTC will rise because it has successfully improved itself!

Eh, I basically agree with you that no other coin really stands a chance of "taking on" or replacing BTC, but my post was based only on the implied possibility in cypherdoc's post that it could happen.

On the flipside, I don't really buy into the One True Ledger^TM thesis, so it doesn't ring true to me that "the principle would be dead" if another coin somehow managed to become the leader. I DO, however, assign an extremely low probability of that happening.

BTC has not yet been anything close to a reliable store of value.

In my mind, it's all about motivation. Right now, there's lots of disagreement about making any changes to Bitcoin that have any (meritorious) objections. In a situation where an altcoin starts surpassing Bitcoin in adoption (unlikely right now) there will there will be plenty of motivation for adopting changes and consensus will be easier to obtain.

Bitcoiners are stubborn, but not stupid and software is flexible.