Quote from: zimmah on June 04, 2014, 10:22:45 AM

Quote from: TERA on June 04, 2014, 09:44:13 AM

Quote from: maker88 on June 03, 2014, 11:30:36 PM

i think the fundamental question here is bitcoin going to be a myspace/facebook thing

Yes Bitcoin will be Myspace and something else will be Facebook...

Unlikely, bitcoin has too many millions invested in it. Both from direct investments as from various forms of infrastructure

People switched from MySpace and many other social networks to facebook simply because nothing was at stake. It did not cost them many to delete their myspace account and open a facebook account.

But when they need to transfer wealth from bitcoin to another form of even more risky currency. Or even across multiple Altcoins. It's something else entirely. Not to mention the much more conservative merchants and investors. We are just starting to get bitcoin accepted by merchants and investors. An altcoin will be years behind on bitcoin and any altcoin has to offer serious benefits to all parties involved (merchants, investors, savers, spenders, etc.) for it to gain even the tiniest amount of traction against bitcoin.

It's just not very likely to happen. Ever.

The first thing a merchant will say when you approach him about pump-and-dump coin #20374 is: "we allready accept bitcoin. Why would we want to accept scamcoin #20374?"

And there you are, trying to explain why your coin is better. But it really isn't because they're all the same, a ripoff premined Ponzi to try and make people who think they missed the boat on bitcoin believe they can make more money on scamcoins. The only ones making money are the creators and early-in early-out guys.

Even if one of the Altcoins comes up with something truly innovative it would be 100000 times easier for bitcoin to just update the protocol than it is for the altcoin to gain even 10 000 users

Great post zimmah, sounds exactly what I've been trying to explain to people who keep spouting that "An alt coin will undoubtedly come along and render Bitcoin obsolete." But you're wasting your breath, some folks just refuse to believe that Bitcoin has to do so little to remain dominant: an easy to use form of value transfer with a HUGE head start in mind share and network effect worldwide. The dollar in one's pocket is also at its basis an easy to use form of money (although very archaic), and has to do little but transfer value from one to another to be useful. And that's the foundation of bitcoin too. This is all the 95% majority of users will really care about.

I remember when RedHat Enterprise Linux first came out over 10 years ago, as a better, free version of Unix for the business enterprise. After that in the first couple of years, scores of "flavors" of enterprise Linux (SuSe, Debian, etc.) cropped up overnight, all competing to dethrone RedHat and prove that they were a "better" version with better "enterprise" features. But at the end of the day, RedHat Linux was first to market, did for corporations what it needed to do, and had a better business support model. When corporations were approached by RedHat competitors, they would reply "Why should we switch to a different distro of Linux? RHEL already does everything we need it to do. And it is the mostly widely supported distro by all of the enterprise application vendors." Now today, RHEL is the corporate standard to run enterprise level applications, and all the other enterprise Linux distros like CentOS, Oracle Linux, etc. are just clones of RHEL.

Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.