Quote from: solex on August 23, 2013, 05:32:39 AM

One point which they did not highlight enough is that because cryptocurrency is software it is much harder for altcoins to displace bitcoin, which is very different from competing manufactured products.

Consider supercoin which has some radically better features than Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin has over $1bn riding on its success there is a significant investment by all the people who use it, own it, mine it, and otherwise profit from the ecosystem. So there would be huge incentive for Bitcoin dev to clone the software changes which make supercoin so super, even if it means a hard fork. Such a hard fork would be tolerated as all bitcoiners want to protect their own interests. As soon as these features are released in a new bitcoin version, then supercoin becomes irrelevant.

Actually the history of software clearly shows that a brilliant new idea that no one foresaw often knocks over an established giant that is not innovating. Actual physical manufacturing is a lot harder to undermine because of the high upfront capital cost needed to have the huge scale to take on someone with market dominance. Feature incorporation is indeed a likely scenario if the feature is cosmetic, but the things that really matter to BTC, the coin cap, the algorithm and the coins durability are all sacrosanct, virtually all alternatives are different in exactly thouse areas that BTC would never change.