I think investing is different from daily use. If the only users were speculators I wouldn't have an issue with them losing everything. If you invest in junk bonds and lose it all it's your fault. The altcoins don't have much of an economy. Those are really investments (so to speak) and their users are out for a quick return. Some of the altcoins are trying new things and might have the ability to overtake Bitcoin while being more stable and safe. In that case, I hope they do leave Bitcoin. I seriously doubt big business, at this point, will jump ship and attach to an altcoin with no name recognition and no established economy.

I know it's impossible to see many problems before they happen. Some issues can be seen ahead of time and corrected. For the most part the dev team has corrected the issues quickly. Sometimes crooks can use real systemic issues as an excuse to steal as Karpeles did with transaction malleability. Is the system so well prepared now that we can scale up and invite even more use and possibly more loss until there's no one left on the earth that's willing to trust Bitcoin?

It's an easy decision for businesses to accept another payment method. It's especially easy when companies like Coinbase are offering the first million dollars of exchanges to fiat for free. Users are a different story. Users need to trust the system and benefit from it. I know low fees are a benefit and this will help. Should the system be throttled limiting the amount of new entry until it's ready for prime time, is it ready now or is there no way to know until it's ramped up? Ever increasing use means ever increasing losses when failure happens. I would hate to be the lead dev knowing I had this huge experimental market sitting on my shoulders. I'm really not trying to be a prick. I'm just giving you food for thought. Mr. Andresen likes to reach out to the community for consensus and that's a good thing. Maybe the word community to him means only the dev team. In that case, he should really just send out an email instead.