Eth adopting PoS makes it a permissioned ledger and not an actual decentralized currency as mentioned in the original post.  It also can't scale to be anything more than a proof of concept with no commercial viability.  It's not progression, it's regression:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1361602.0

Factom is a consensus ripoff of Bitshares except turned into a completely centralized company.  I don't know why the coin even exists.  They should have just opened a building for BTC services.

Maidsafe...the only thing I don't know enough about to comment on.  Haven't kept up with it's development.  I have yet to see anything that's an actual threat to Bitcoin so far though.


I knew a random Moneroer would show up eventually.  It's possible Monero or Zcash will occupy some type of niche market, but the anon wars of incrementalism would have to end first, and I'm not really seeing how that's going to happen.  You would need to subscribe to four ideas for Monero to really do something:

1)  Smooth's claim that currency is the killer app of the blockchain (likely plausible)
2)  Anonymity is a mandatory feature set of that app (less plausible)
3)  Governments would not make the anon currency extremely difficult to use while allowing BTC instead, crippling the anon currency market cap
4)  The need to believe on-chain anonymity would be useful in a clearing/settlement network.

If your key feature is not utilized in the likely evolution of the network, you're relegated back to the niche market.  That niche market could be worth billions of dollars though, so I guess it's all relative.  BTC on the other hand could go to trillions as a settlement layer.  There's just not an overwhelming need to make Bitcoin obsolete and switch when both coins operate roughly the same in the end game.  Ring signatures will likely block many further on-chain scaling options to boot.  So yea, it could be valuable, but likely not a threat to Bitcoin.