The ripples marketcap is almost half of the bitcoins marketcap. It made me to think that not only #2 spot is shakable but also the #1 spot.
Number 1 place is shakeable. But it will take a decade to get there with right development strategy.
Also the single fact that institutional investors (american funds) not long ago started trading with the Bitcoint points out that the marketcap will double, triple and quadriple in the course of 1 year or so. IOTA needs to get on the good side of FCC by implementing better security in near future.
I didnt mean only IOTA has the chance to take over bitcoins #1 spot. I meant any coins have the chance based on todays trend as long as they do it right. I dont think it will take a decade. Again, based on todays trend it could happen in a couple of years.
Here is a single drawback inherited by almost any cryptocurrency from original Bitcoin algorithm (related to the term blockchain): as transaction volume grows the calculation complexity increases as well. The more popular coin becomes the less number of transactions per second is possible. Bitcoin grew so much that only 8 transactions per second available for anywhere in whole world. Think about it - this cryptocurrency is useless now for use as an actual currency in online stores for wide use. The delays are ridiculious if you would like to send bitcoin anywhere. This situation will even become worse overtime.
IOTA is different from this prospective, the number of transactions per second is unlimited. As long as other factors are covered (such as security holes, trust by users to dev team, bug fixes with the second transaction erasing first unconfirmed transaction, etc) this coin has a bright future. But there is also possibility that developers wont improve it and some other better coin with frequent transaction scalability comes out and IOTA will loose momentum as the result.