SC won't solve Bitcoin's scalability because they will optimize spamming Bitcoin for metadata. We'll be right back to the block size argument again. In fact, they will make it happen much faster.
Oh. I completely agree! My sentence earlier was poorly worded, I meant that scaling is important (whether or not SC happens).
EDIT: I see from the graph in a subsequent post that my intuition was correct. It isn't entirely up to date but shows alts at 4%. It's really quite silly for that to motivate anything at all about Bitcoin development. For sidechains to be a good idea they had better be a good idea independent of alts
Yes, the graph is interesting, but for a month, at least, it has been hovering near 90%, where it still stands (4832M / 5342M).
http://coinmarketcap.com/#USDAssuming the same underlying data is used by both sources.
Note: if Bitshares, Counterparty and Mastercoin are included in Bitcoin, then it is 91%
Okay, so you have one data point from that source, which more or less agrees with my original rough estimate of 10%. I still doubt the number measured that way or any other reasonable way is increasing. Alts have not exactly been doing well the past several months, in case you haven't noticed. Further in support is that every study I've seen says that alts are highly correlated with Bitcoin but positively leveraged, and since Bitcoin is down so much the alts are likely down more. But I don't have hard data other than the one chart that was posted. Do you?
BTW, the observation that alts are positively correlated with Bitcoin raises serious questions about the argument that alts "take value" from Bitcoin. Substitute goods would have negative correlation.