1. working multi-sig implemented in actual businesses, for one.
It's a lot easier to implement multi-sig to alts, then it's to implement advancements in coin creation (PoS mining or stability mechanism) to bitcoin.
2. oh yes it did. it had a 4 million address space problem which was noticed 20 years ago and was fixed in a follow-up protocol ipv6 18 (!!) years ago and still it has 3% penetration regardless of everyone's efforts. Because it costs money to upgrade all the infrastructure! Even though most hardware supports it, nobody cares enough to fix software because there's no fatal flaw and everything "just works" on ipv4. That would be the reasoning why bitcoin, if ever replaced, would go out in a very long co-existence process with a new currency.
IPv4's space exhaustion and bitcoins impracticalities aren't comparable. IPv4 is usable for it's purpose, but only has limitations in future expansion. Bitcoin in another hand, has impracticalities that limit it from being a practical currency at the present time. So, a more advanced system needs to be taken into use at present also.
3. There is some truth to it, that service investments are currency-agnostic, however as I firmly believe, bitcoin can't possibly just "disappear" as myspace did - many unique services are bitcoin only, millions of USD in support network is bitcoin-only, so the switch will be slow and painful, not matter how amazingly good new currency might be.
Your reasoning is very similar to early delusional bulls who said "ok bitcoin is so much superior to the world's financial system that it will replace all of it tomorrow". This just does not happen like that. Step 1 - you build something that is unique and impossible under the old system. Step 2 - you win users to trust you with their finances. Step 3 - they move.
You think that right after you come up with a better idea you go to Step 1 "it wins". You miss alot of steps.
Those millions mean nothing when considering the potential that this idea of open-sourced monetary systems have. This idea has potential to become practical on the larger scale to actually make money much cheaper. Meaning that it will cost a lot less in the future to hold up the monetary system. Bitcoin can only offer an innovative gambling platform for people to play on. It's impractical as money, because it lacks any mechanism for stability, and that is one of the most important aspects of an quality currency.
So if I understand you correctly, you are telling people to invest in altcoins (probably with more or less specific recommendations based on coins you own).
Where is that any different at all from bitcoin early adopters?
I'm telling people that it would be better to realize that the time of bitcoin is at it's end.
My aim is not to tell that the beginnings of new and better cryptos are any different then the beginning of bitcoin
was. Bitcoin had it's time when it was advanced for it's time. Now that time is at it's end.
Do you want me to buy into the nxt early adopters or ripple "cryptocurrency" ? Whats your perspective on alts forked from other innovative alts purely for more fairness with distribution?
I won't tell you on what specific currencies to buy. This would help the bitcoin fanatics to turn this thread into an "trollfest" even more. So, do your own research.
I think that an important part of the technological development of future currencies is a mechanism that will make the distribution more "fair". Meaning that there will be more practicality and less gambling.
All you want is a different wealth distribution with yourself at the top. It is not about wasting energy or being more fair.
It is only about you personally gaining because you find it unfair that others were lucky.
No I don't. Actually that's one of my main criticism of bitcoin fanatics and the rhetoric about their "fight against the evil banksters and unfair distribution". They aren't about changing the system so that monetary rules would be equal to everyone. They are about bringing the old system down, so they could build a clone of that system, only with them on top.
An advanced monetary system will be the one where luck or personal connections have less to do with gain. It will be more transparent and objective in rewarding work.
That isn't the same as bitcoin mining, your Volkswagen analogy. That's doing for the sake of doing things repeatedly, and that is indeed stupid and inefficient. While for the mining of bitcoin using cryptography, the millions and millions of hashes are required to find the right hash function to solve a block to be able to give out bitcoins. Brute-forcing is the only way to go, as long as cryptocurrencies are based on, duh, cryptography.
My analogy was an counter-argument to an argument, that bitcoins inefficient mining is good because it gives bitcoin value.
This analogy was to clearly show on why giving value to something with useless work is stupid.
The main gain for bitcoins cryptographic system was to offer it security. The security part already failed when all the hashing started to be pooled together on single points. That created a situation where the increase of hashrate didn't increase security of bitcoin. The security of an mining pool doesn't increase with increased hashrate. All you have to do is to compromise those pools to compromise the network. So, bitcoin hashing has absolutely no use.
Money should be cheap if only to encourage spending. And to be honest I personally do not see Bitcoin as currency as much as a store of value. Which is why I don't really feel appropriate calling Bitcoin a cryptocurrency. It's more like digital gold. Like gold, you don't use your gold to buy stuff, you sell your gold for fiat to buy stuff.
Money should be cheap for people, so they could use money without high costs of it's use. Especially if those costs go to useless directions. It has nothing to do with encouraging spending. You're not distinguishing inflation and the cost of money as an tool of trade. These are totally different subjects.
My personal opinion is that it's stupid to consider something as a store of value, that is almost only built on speculation. But that's my taste when choosing where to store value. To me, speculation is fragile and unpredictable when compared to actual stable need.