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Comment by murph37 | Hacker News Reader

This is a large concern for me. If cryptocurrencies begin to attract more users and widespread adoption, what is preventing a new coin that corrects Bitcoin's inefficiencies from ultimately gaining more users and superseding it? I would love to know your guy's thoughts.

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Why would that necessarily be a problem? If it's a form of money, to be exchanged for goods and services, why does the specific currency matter? For most people it could be just like switching from Francs to Euros, say -- a little disruptive in the short term but overall no big deal.

If a competitor is able to fix some of Bitcoin's serious problems, it deserves to win. Though I can understand if you're worried about competitors that lack some of Bitcoin's key properties.

There are plenty of coins already that are technically better than Bitcoin. It's just that Bitcoin has the network effect.

So perhaps one day a new coin will overtake Bitcoin, but my guess is that the coin will need a very distinct advanatge to gain traction.

There are plenty of coins already that are technically better than Bitcoin.

Is there anything that fixes the wasteful mining process? To me that seems like a serious flaw in Bitcoin.

Iota uses a "tangle" instead of a block chain

Sounds interesting!

But a quick search sent me to https://iota.org, and oh my gosh, that website is impossible to use. Uninterruptable animations and completely broken scrolling. Oh well.

EDIT to add: suddenly I'm reminded of "For the love of God, please tell me what your company does" from the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15170182). Probably the incomprehensible website means Iota is aimed at big businesses, not individuals.

I think that you are right. I think that politics (in a broad term) will play a more important role than technology here. Right now the adoption of bitcoin is widespread, but still quite niche (technological people and investors).

I wonder what will drive adoption from the general public. And I wonder whether AGFAM will play any role in it.

You need to bootstrap the infrastructure by convincing miners to join your cause. A well-heeled entity could just offer fiat money (which miners apparently still like), a less well-heeled entity could somehow differentiate at the mining level, e.g. by designing proof-of-work algorithms that would work on home GPUs or CPUs (and thus be accessible to billions of home PC users) which is what Litecoin and some others attempted to address.

The deflationary aspect of Bitcoin will probably get in the way at some point - hypothetically, if you owned BTC and USD today, why would you ever spend a BTC? Spending even costs you money (in transaction fees), while saving doesn't. It's the system that rewards hoarding.

Nothing, and it's actually easy to make the argument that that was the intent, in the open source, freedom of choice, no centralization, heck the powers kind of environments Bitcoin became popular through.

Very true. I guess a better question would be, why is Bitcoin able to maintain its market share, popularity, and lead now? Will it be able to maintain it moving forward?

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