I don't see Bitcoin dying unless (until?) it's discovered to have an incurable security flaw.
If people would rather use something else to trade with, bitcoin stops being potentially widely used in trade.
If bitcoin stops being potentially widely used in trade, it stops being a potentially good store of value.
If it stops being a potentially good store of value, it stops being something people want to speculate on.
If people don't want to speculate on it, the price crashes.
In other words, the whole value proposition of bitcoin rests on the idea that it is useful for trade.
In other words, that you'd rather use it than at least one of the set:
{credit cards, cash, paypal, regular wire transfers, wire transfers involving foreign currency exchange}.
That said---I have not read the Bitcoin-NG paper yet but others are saying it is highly centralized, which would make it a non-starter.
This is the key problem with moving away from bitcoin. Both parties have to accept whatever the new currency is. The real issue any of the alt coins face (and even bitcoin itself) is user adoption. People won't adopt a new currency just because it's good, it has to be popular/accepted.
Sure, if bitcoin were widely used, it would be very hard for something else to overtake it. But it's not widely used yet. We have not really reached that point. Something else can still be http and bitcoin can still be gopher.
That said, I am still speculating long-term on bitcoin becuase I don't think anybody can/will come out with something that is non-marginally better.
Bitcoin-NG is precisely as decentralized as Bitcoin. Whereas in Bitcoin, a miner is elected via a distributed lottery to determine the transactions that took place in the preceding 10 minutes, in NG, a miner is elected via a distributed lottery to determine the transactions that take place in the following 10 minutes.
How do nodes handle the sudden peaks in traffic when selected on the "round-robin" PoW scheme when load is high? How do the network handle the ever shifting connections (with TCP session setups and all), what's the topology?
Are you considering the effect of the current leader being attacked by 0-days,what do that do to the network when it gets hijacked?
What if the leader drops off or otherwise have connectivity issues?
Then again, if the lottery likelihood is a function of hashing power then maybe it's not so well distributed.
AFAIK, that's not possible. Secure hashing algorithms tend to fracture instead of completely break, so there will be some warning; to change to a new algorithm, simply more than 50% of the Bitcoin miners would have to mine on the chain that relies on that new algorithm, and it thus becomes "voted" in.
> AFAIK, that's not possible.
That's an incredibly stupid thing to say. Please don't comment on topics you're ignorant on; you're spreading misinformation.
Obviously the hashing algorithm is one of the stronger points in bitcoin's implementation; that's completely irrelevant.
"It is worth noting that there is no conflict or contradiction between NG and Blockstream’s sidechains; in fact, Blockstream’s pegs allow for moving bitcoins among chains, and such chains can benefit from improved performance using Bitcoin-NG. In future work, we plan to expand on how to incrementally deploy Bitcoin-NG on top of the current Bitcoin network."