Diversity applies between equal players, otherwise it's just treehugger underdog-loving bullshit. Capitalism hates diversity if there is no (obvious, short term) profit in it. Thats what humans are. Technically, you need something to sustain the volume for things to work.
I really hope you're wrong; diversity is a fantastic guard against crashes. Time will tell.
Edit:I should add that I'm not talking specifically about litecoin/shitecoin/etc. I'm talking about currencies created to be particularly useful in certain cases or environments.
In bitcoin chain, you create the transaction as usual, but keep it secret until counterparty shows you it's altchain transaction. You send only it's hash (txid) to counterparty on altchain for that purpose. There, transaction has special input opcode 'bitcointxid'. This opcode evaluates to true *only* if the txid is seen actually included in bitcoin blockchain. Naturally, altchain client needs to consult bitcoin blockchain during validation as well (but you need bitcoin anyway for other reasons, even SPV will suffice if you replace txid with hash(txid)). Thus, both transactions become valid only if both parties transmit them on network.
(taken from
https://github.com/bitcoinx/colored-coin-tools/wiki/crosschain-p2ptrade )
I see. Makes sense in theory; seems like somewhere between the chain-trade alg and Marketcoin.
There are some cases not covered by the above, though, which could take place during the exchange of information / between broadcasts which could compromise the trade. Has anyone written any more on the above?
I can, however, see how some easy modifications could eliminate some edge conditions.
Edit2:I've responded to tumak's post below in a PM to avoid derailing the thread further