Clearly there is a battle for dominance in this market. The underlying system does have an influence on what people perceive is the best system even if its told to them by experts. People don't really understand how Bitcoin works but after 5 mins they can see people can see their transactions so they arent anonomous and they must wait a few minutes before they can send safely Bitcoin. NXT transfers in an instant, as does Ripple, innovation is coming as new protocols are coded.
But if you think the battle for dominant system that the masses might be using in 10 years time is as its already decided? I would love to know what you think it is?
Why not go out into the street and ask the first person you see and ask them if they are using Bitcoin or NXT for their digital transactions. Like I said its an open field, we don't know what protocol or network the average person will be using years from now...if any.
Exactly, that is why I ask why I should support his particular one here? It adds nothing new to the protocol and network part of cryptocurrencies. At least, nobody could tell me one thing until now. So, I would like to see my resources invested in hardening and refining existing protocols and networks until somebody has a unique idea that is unable to be implemented in Nxt or Bitcoin.
That was all of my personal investment. You asked about my opinion whether that battle you described is settled:
I cannot forecast the future. However, I conceive real PoS (in the sense of Nxt, not in the sense of PPC or NVC) is the biggest leap forward for the cryptocurrency community. Everything new has to offer even more benefits and that is going to be real challenge in my opinion. With real PoS, we removed one big if not the biggest disadvantage of Bitcoin: wasting energy unnecessarily.
What is next? StorageCoin could be such thing as it offers real benefits (still on the infrastructure level), but they deliberately rely on Nxt for the consensus mechanism.
What about those neat features in Nxt (Asset Exchange, Voting System, Monetary System, Lending/Borrowing, to name a few)? That is because of the Nxt community. It has nothing to do with the technology as such. Compared to Bitcoin, the Nxt community is more flexible and more open. Nobody can tell whether the Nxt community will be as conservative as Bitcoin's is today. Right now, Nxt is the place where innovation is happening ON TOP of it. We simply do not need yet another blockchain to implement our ideas because Nxt allows it out of the box.