Quote from: shields on July 03, 2014, 01:29:45 PM

Quote from: zimmah on July 03, 2014, 12:29:27 PM

Quote from: rpietila on July 03, 2014, 11:41:48 AM

Quote from: shields on July 03, 2014, 11:27:48 AM

But the dot-coms were companies not the technology. The success of the internet itself never faltered, it's just that people scrambled to speculate on companies to capitalise on it, and some terrible or highly risky companies got too much money. It's easier to say Bitcoin itself will succeed than it is to say that blockchain.info or coinbase will be the next google. There's also another dimension to crypto in that there can be an alt-coin bubble in parallel.

So, with the dot-com bubble, pets.com is often used an example of the crash. The pets.com of crypto could be a company (e.g. gox), or it could be an alt coin (e.g. litecoin), but it's not crypto itself. Just as HTTP and SMTP (email) went from strength to strength, so will crypto.

On the otherhand there is a possibility that another crypto overtakes Bitcoin, but this won't happen overnight, and any Bitcoin holders would have plenty of time to diversify towards the alternative before suffering any real loss.

Emphasized for emphasis.

They will likely speak of a "crypto bubble" sometime soon, emphasizing the failure of all other cryptos (and implying a failure of bitcoin as well, most likely just after a peak during a bear market). But indeed bitcoin will be like the internet. It will continue and it won't care what happens around it. And they will surely make reference to the dot com bubble. Bad news sells, good news does not.

The Bitcoin 'bubble' has already done the media cycle at least twice, sentiment is starting to change, it's no longer treated as a fad so much. Other crytpos aren't really even on the media radar tbh.

Quote from: zimmah on July 03, 2014, 12:29:27 PM

And with the millions upon millions invested in bitcoin I doubt anyone will seriously even think about switching to a different crypto. It's not as easy as pressing "delete myspace account" and "welcome to facebook".

Well i think it is as easy, I can with a single click trade all my Bitcoins for any other alt currency on an exchange instantly. What is important is that it would take a catastrophic event to cause a critical mass of people to do this in the same time frameframe, and to the same alt coin. It's possible, just really unlikely.

sure, you can change, but there's a lot of risk and loss of money involved.

Also, what about all the VCs, Wall street, and Merchant adoption. Will they follow you to your new beloved altcoin?

That's what i mean.

Facebook and myspace work well on their own (altough facebook has integration with many other websites nowadays, but back then it did not).

You can't just swap to an altcoin and expect merchants to accept it. What use is an altcoin with a 'better sourcecode' if you can't spend it anywhere?

That's why bitcoin will stay.

It's like, people switched from MySpace to facebook, but they still use HTTP to get there. They switched from hotmail to gmail, but they still use SMTP. Etc.

Since bitcoin has it's own protocol, that is by design not compatible with altcoins (as that would be like creating more than 21 million coins). Either the whole protocol itself will fail, or bitcoin will succeed, both as a protocol as well as a currency.

What is most likely to happen?