Quote from: cbeast on February 10, 2016, 08:31:38 PM

Bitcoin is somewhere between Monero and Ethereum. You need contracting, but too much creates complexity traps. Some folks are trying to make Bitcoin too complex and adding unneeded features. Those will be selected out in future forks. The safest route is minimal functionality for what is most needed. Monero doesn't have enough to be useful for Zooko's Triangle. Everything else will be cloned and branded and not a store of value.

This is actually something a lot of people don't realize. For a coin to function, it has to be open source. And if a coin has something cool and new in it that is genuinely starting to make bitcoin irrelevant, then the open source nature of the coin means we can copy that feature into bitcoin. Of course the move could cause a hard fork and be contentious in many ways, but in a dire situation where a coin is putting bitcoin out of business, the network will react.

I don't particularly like that bitcoin is reactionary not proactive, but I have no doubt that bitcoin will always be the top coin. Its better to maintain stability with less features and add them later as other coins experiment to find the new stuff.

EDIT: For that matter, is anything blockstream doing with lightning and so on going to be open source? If so, how do they tell their investors they will get a 10x return when anyone could copy it to fork their own version or implement it right into bitcoin? If not, who is going to trust them to handle their money?