Quote from: jgorham on November 23, 2013, 08:34:06 AM

At this point BTC has such a large lead in the network effect that the only reason to buy any alt coin is if you think it will outperform Bitcoin. So will PPC outperform BTC? As the main difference is PoS v PoW the question becomes "will Bitcoin's PoW model ever cause risk to its overall adoption?"

Why the answer might be yes: organized 51% attack from a large pool, NSA or other body corrupting ASIC hardware, or a technological advance that obsoletes ASICs but is held by a small party.

I agree the answer is yes, your answer is one possible reason why but there are also others I see with varying degrees of importance. Overall efficiency and cost effectiveness, yes a POW blockchain is vastly more cost effective than the traditional banking/payment processing system but it still requires a huge amount of computing resources and electricity as compared to a POS blockchain. Providing an incentive for more people to run full nodes and participate in the mining process, anyone with coins can mine without any sort of special hardware and this makes it more decentralized. PPC attackers must attack themselves, you need to get your hands on PPC to launch an attack and if your attack is successful then it causes your PPC to tank in value, thereby devaluing your own assets, which is a good rational disincentive to attack the chain.

Even if BTC proved thoroughly resistant to a 51% attack in the future, I would still see legitimate reasons to use PPC instead.

I'm talking myself into buying more PPC at this point but I'm still not convinced that it could really survive long-term.