Didn't Marc Andreesen also invest in Coinbase? Didn't Marc Andreesen recently put the smackdown to Warren Buffett, in defense of Bitcoin. Didn't the creator of Ripple, Jed McCaleb, leave Ripple to work on a secret Bitcoin project? Isn't it year 5 of Bitcoin. Didn't it take the Internet decades before it was finally widely adopted?
LOL sorry dude. Ripple's not doing anything, Bitcoin's fine and always will be. Just needs time to grow.
One...trick...pony. Maybe better to compare it to AOL or something like that. Not the whole internet.
How is it one trick pony though?
Isn't it a currency, protocol, payment method, distributed ledger, all rolled into one. The internet has some of the same qualities. TCP/IP v4 anyone? When is that getting replaced?
Because the internet is useful in a multitude of ways. Bitcoin just sends and receives Bitcoin. Maybe comparing it to email would be better but even then, we're talking about pre-SMTP email because it can only send to one wallet type. Bitcoin. So it's like a pre-federated email. I'm not knocking Bitcoin per se, just the reference to comparing it to the internet. It will never be as useful in so many ways as the internet. Even if you could dream up the ways, the blockchain could never handle it. Better tech will arise from the proof-of-concept that Bitcoin is but Bitcoin will never be on an "internet" level of functionality and usefulness. It's just a single currency/commodity with one main function. I'm almost surprised this has to be explained. Almost...
What better tech do you speak of? Ripple LOL? Have you ever considered Bitcoin could be used in an election one day? Can you send Gold or Silver to someone else around the world easily in minutes? I guess you can Paypal or Western Union it but that's if you like dealing with fees.
Good, so you're conceding the Bitcoin as internet reference. Smart. Moving on...
Ripple is a good looking option. It's very versatile, currency agnostic, blah, blah, blah. It's like a currency, swiss army knife.
But I don't think people will stop creating and developing. Look, Bitcoin solved the double-spend problem. Great...now that can be reproduced for anything. Voting is a very good example. Although, the blockchain doesn't scale so I don't see how it would ever handle such a load, plus transactions. There's a number of ways to handle voting via Ripple, but a simple fork of Bitcoin could be created to handle such a task. I really think people overvalue the significance of Bitcoin as a brand and lose site of the tech, which is all that matters. Then again, some don't really want to change the world, unless they get rich in the process.