Quote from: go1111111 on December 12, 2013, 06:34:03 AM

Quote from: Mylon on December 12, 2013, 06:27:29 AM

Thing is, you can't you restructure the client overnight, when the new alt-coin has something truly innovating (which would be the only reason to switch) it would require an hardfork in bitcoin, if you would want to implement it. Not something that will happen overnight.

On the other hand, switching over to the new currency (by trading) would be real easy.

Buying the new currency would be easy for pretty much everyone on this forum. However it would likely take years to build up the infrastructure and community that Bitcoin has now. I think people vastly underestimate how hard it is to build up the infrastructure and community that Bitcoin has now (Erik Voorhees has talked about this a lot recently).

On the other hand, even for a radically different new coin, I expect the Bitcoin community could integrate it within a couple months as they'd have the source code of the new coin.

Well this might be me personally, but I see the entire layer build on top of Bitcoin, separate from Bitcoin itself. Because all that those layers do, is build on the Bitcoin API. Where the Bitcoin client is forcibly delayed by hardforks, I don't see any reason for the infrastructure on top of it, to be so depended on specifically Bitcoin. (Hardfork means at least 6 months, before it can be enforced) While everything build on top of it, just needs to recheck all the API hooks, and can technically be ready to go again in a matter of hours/days.
Plus the moment litecoin gains some more traction, there will most likely be a lot of merchants adding that one in, which opens the door to easily addable crypto currencies.