I don't think so : an altcoin, whatever his technology may be will never defeat Bitcoin, because to elect the best crypto-currency, we look at how many people use it. No altcoin will ever surpass Bitcoin because the average people absolutely don't care about the internal problems, and I do not see any internal problem as of today. The branding is whatever matters the most, and good luck defeating Bitcoin's branding ! Most of the people that know some economical things knew about Bitcoin, but absolutely none about things like Ethereum or Litecoin. Good luck releasing something that beats Bitcoin on all the points, which is basically impossible if you conduct an IPO or an ICO.
Bitcoin only has a couple million users at best. A very small social network is 100 million users. I think we can get more users than Bitcoin. I had a million users for my CoolPage s/w in 2002 when the Internet was 10X smaller.
Btw, I never contemplate killing Bitcoin. Bitcoin will continue to be the on/off ramp to/from fiat. No altcoin will supplant that. Thus Bitcoin will remain the reserve currency of crypto. But in terms of scaling and adoption, yeah I think we can challenge Bitcoin.
The distribution is not going to be primarily ICO. And it is not going to be PoW either. And it is not going to be Steem's voting rewards. It is going to be something better.
My problem is not the ideas and design work, it is the hard slog of execution. Execution requires capital and larger development teams (but not too large just a few guys who are well focused and professionals). So we will need a small ICO at testnet stage (meaning in theory very high multiples of upside potential and this will need to be explained in terms of the ongoing distribution but I don't want to reveal that now), to get enough capital to hire some more devs to do all the ecosystem development work that has to be done. I can't do that all programming by myself. I am just hoping to be able to complete the development work to have something functioning at testnet.
Reading the following thread can give some insight into the knowledge I have gained from organizing the whitepaper:
https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos/issues/47If possible, I would be interested in possibly hiring some devs from outside our ecosystem. Some professional programmers. Or perhaps working with IOHK as consultants (perhaps but I can't speak to any compatibility between Charles' operation and myself). Actually selecting and hiring devs is also a major pita.