Quote from: FreeTrade on July 18, 2014, 07:14:06 AM

Yet you still speak of a 'dominant cryptocurrency' - I feel this is the source of our different understanding, you think the world will become fixated on a single cryptocurrency. I think the current power-law distribution of crypto will be up-ended.

To the extent that a single crypto-currency (one set of features) can't meet the needs of all the people, then there will be fragmentation. But people prefer to have a winner take all, because they like simplicity and the assurance they are with the rest of the herd.

Ideally we would have many competing crypto-currencies, because that in theory could provide the most decentralized scaling. But one would assume that the implementation and feature set quality would be power law distributed, because it requires investment.

We may go through a period of proliferation of experiments, before settling in on the winner. The winner might already be Bitcoin, which in my opinion is not sufficient to scale to the global population (where it is now with a couple of big pools, exchanges, and merchant service providers, it can only scale with the centralization of Peter Thiel which means it can't outscale fiat, because he is a fiat slave[1] and the fiat world is headed for a collapse and global consolidation).

My intuition is the market is hungry for an altcoin with serious quality of implementation and feature set that bests Bitcoin and that is structured to remain decentralized. I believe such an altcoin will quickly dominate.

I don't have a lot of analytical sources to back up my intuition at this point (don't have time to go off on that tangent right now, e.g. could begin reading Moldbug's "there can only be one").

P.S. Thiel is the angel investor of Facebook too, so I assume they can do a social media rollout for their bastardized Bitcoin services integrated with that other app they recently purchased (the name escapes my memory...WhatsApp?). But it is not decentralized, thus it can't scale exponentially as fast as a network (Metcalf's law). As soon as you put a centralized node in the process, the scaling of Metcalf's law is reduced.

[1] Ever tried using Paypal and have absurdly stupid shit happen to you because they are slaves to KYC, AML, and other edicts? Happened to me numerous times. Also his (with Elon Musk) Tesla Motors only made it because of government subsidies.