I
wrote upthread that I am not that fearful of hyperinflation due to a proliferation of altcoins. To expound a bit, I doubt very much the market will choose to give equal weighting to numerous xerox coins. I think the market will focus in on one winner, or possibly two for example if one coin needs to be 90+% anonymous and the other needs to be compliant with government oversight. Perhaps someone can think of another market segmentation for why we might need 3 dominant coins. And the market may invest in a few best alternatives at lower market caps to keep the leading coin(s) honest, e.g. analogous to the bimetallic gold and silver standard. This should stabilize and not spiral off into hyperinflation, due the value of network effects, the market cost of changing brands (a.k.a. good will ... see how much difficulty moolaching has in
finding a good alternative brand name), and the fact that the variables for a better design are limited (eventually we will stabilize and not be able to find a much better design any more). I agree with Adam Beck that we should try to find the minimum set of features that need to be in the coin protocol, so that extra features can be built orthogonally on top of that base protocol.
Also currency is not a store-of-value. It never has been due to Gresham's Law. The purpose of the dominant currency is unit-of-exchange. If you make the currency too finite (Impaler uses the word too "hard"), the bad (more debased) currency drives it out-of-circulation. Just look what happened to silver coinage in the 1960s all over the world it disappeared into private hoards. Note Gresham's Law requires the force of legal tender, i.e. the bad currency must be the one sanctioned by society.
So if we really want to build a dominant currency, we need perpetual debasement (or Impaler's Freicoin demurrage). And Bitcoin is never going to change to that because there are people who don't understand what I have written in this thread about perpetual debasement, and they will not change their (I assert is incorrect) logic any time soon. To change that in Bitcoin would fork the coin.
Edit:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=483989.msg5346113#msg5346113I wonder what the future holds since there's always going to be new altcoins. Will any one coin really benefit? If one becomes too popular, then a new one is launched to try and recreate it and make some money.
The market will not take seriously copycat altcoins, because the vast amount of development resources will be in the serious coin that was first and done right.
Markets demand a winner, because otherwise there is no value and the entire crypto-currency concept dies.
Although the barrier to entry for a new
innovative altcoin is not insurmountable as
I explained, the
network efforts are such that
an exact copycat is not a replacement good.
Thus most (but
not all) of these altcoins are just pump-n-dump schemes and (possibly ephemeral) marketing manias analogous to
Beanie Babies.