Attacker hires [unethical hacker] to enter BTC dev circles, contribute, gain team trust, and eventually sneak a remote code execution vulnerability (disguised as a honest coding mistake, of course) into main.
I dont think you even need a lot of money for that, the grey/black hat hacker just does it as his own project... There ought to be some really serious scrutiny of every byte every check-in. Maybe bitcoin should think about paying a bounty for the bugs out of some slush even.
Some of those guys ranging through black, grey to white hackers are very very smart. If they can find new 0-days, in highly reviewed code, and sell it on the grey (legit actually) market - they are well qualified to know what a subtle mistake looks like, and how one would create one.
I am anti-fork as bad for mindshare, confidence and dilutive of bitcoin and crypto currency value aggregate.
Seriously though [...] truly innovative alt-coins as opposed to one-two tweak clones) are useful.
They prevent monoculture.
If anything, we need more altcoins pursuing different niches (I feel that there are market niches which BTC, contrary to popular belief, fills imperfectly, allowing for an alt to take that niche without affecting mainstream btc adoption - but that's a long and boring story)
Ok you called me on that. Your points are valid also IMO. I was mostly reacting to the 'one-two teak clones' as you put it that are basically 100% bitcoin with paramtweaks. I should have qualified that with simple no difference forks. Otherwise why would each person not start the same code or a paramtweak metoocoin etc in their own name and go for the first mover coins until there are 100k coins types and the concept of a cryptocurrency gets weakened by the noise! Its confusing to the semi-technical viewer and erodes the meaning of a cryptocurrency. But yes part of an experiment is potentially the economics which maybe you cant really tell without operating it.
There are limitations with bitcoin, things that could be improved, maybe crytpographic and/or p2p optimizations perhaps that could jump scalability up, reduce network requirements of peers, etc
Different mining and decentralization retaining features etc.
The research and experimentation brings value. Maybe in the longer term bitcoin would merge an innovation to improve. And worse cast, yes a monoculture defense, if bitcoin lost its way.
The first mover thing is odd though. No one knows if an alt-coin will perhaps for some unforseen reason overtake, if bitcoin hits a big stumbling block people didnt see coming.
Adam