Alt-coins that aren't using Bitcoin's codebase are the only ones that stand a chance to even remotely stand alongside/compete with Bitcoin."
I certantly wouldn't agree there. For people that are actually willing to write code an inability to just copy and paste is not much of a barrier.
How about, you know, actually offering a distinct value that justifies having a whole other currency (e.g. friecoin)?
Edit: I removed some spam plugging Bytecoin based (e.g. bytecoin, monero, fantom, etc.) coins from this thread which also spammed other threads but to the extent that there was a genuine misunderstanding, and not just a desire to spam I figure I should comment... the bytecoin ring signature is pretty straight forward to add to Bitcoin though it implies a pretty considerable scalability tradeoff. Andytoshi and I have come up with some pretty substantial cryptographic improvements, e.g.
https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/brs-arbitrary-output-sizes.txtI pretty much agree with gmax here.
See there are so many people wanting feature x y z....firstly those features are almost always hype as in not really a feature and not delivered anyway.
Eg faster transactions. Anyone who has played any FPS should understand latency times, and how this limits data between different points. "faster" block times in BTC code base just mean more orphans, and pternitally more competing chains. But so many people don't get this.
BTC needs to be just BTC. If improvements are genuine, then the forked coin will survive on that basis.
It is far preferable to have competent dev on BTC, did you see the devs on the last release?
Gmax and friends should not be constantly peppered with I want feature X.
The crytpo landscape at the moment is dividing in BTC/Peercoin/POS/NXT/Ripple/CPU coins.....?Maidsafe/etherium?
if you feel strongly go and dev a coin or pay some one to dev a coin