I just posted this in another topic:
Anyone who thinks that the bitcoin community will remain totally in agreement in the future is simply either an idiot or protecting their btc holdings with their fanatically closed minded preaching (a la Goldbugs).
'Just fork bitcoin instead' I hear you cry. That isn't going to work as well. Too much confusion. Also you might get a new power struggle etc with the forking teams. Better to have competing alts in parallel the whole time. Ltc and its highly competent dev team (or someone else) can snap at Bitcoins heels continuously 'keeping them in line' and doing a good honest job.
Very well said. The obviously greed-motivated territorial hostility towards alts has to stop. What is going to protect you when the insiders at the Bitcoin Foundation sell bitcoin out? Are you going to start your own foundation? Going to fork bitcoin?
Obviously, the answer for the regular non-cryptowizardprogrammer is "No". You have NO POWER, except to switch to another product, in other words, an altcoin which has not been sold out, and it's very easy to do so, just use one of the exchanges, sell BTC, buy LTC, or whatever. It's the ONLY POWER, as a consumer, that you have.
i'm not sure what that would really do. it'd just roll the ball forward, setting things up to re-occur again. if you invest in an alt cryptocurrency, and it grows into the mainstream again, the same shit would happen. humans would corrupt it.