I've seen a handful of people mentioning the possibility of XMR overtaking BTC. Is this just XMR fever talking, or is there some rational basis for this argument?
I see the odds of XMR overtaking BTC being close to nil. That said, I believe there's a high probability it could be a strong 2nd, overtaking LTC as BTC's "silver".
I generally agree with you. I have said from the beginning that it could be useful to have both a transparent blockchain and this sort of obscured blockchain running side-by-side. Yes there are ways that either coin could fill the shoes of the other but I don't think that is going to happen. I think Monero will be used primarily for wealth storage and private transactions and Bitcoin will be used primarily for transparent transactions and as an open blockchain. One difference between Monero and Litecoin though. Monero is not designed to be cheap. So I could see Moneros top price being a much greater fraction of bitcoin's price and litecoin could ever be. If I'm drunk enough I can even imagine scenarios in which Monero is more valuable than Bitcoin per unit . In this case it wouldn't be Bitcoin silver it would be Bitcoins Platinum. But as to it replacing Bitcoin? There's a lot of reasons that that seems silly to me.