you dont need to wait an hour to buy your coffee. when i send my coin from wallet to wallet it takes seconds to show up as an incoming transaction. you dont need to wait 6 confirmations for $2.50.
if i send a $1m across the globe it will be there instantly and confirmed within an hour. no one can beat that,
I think the point here that everyone's missing is this:
What happened 20 years ago when eMail started arriving on the scene en masse ? Did it kill the post office services ?
No.
What happened is that a whole new layer of communications fired up that wasn't there before. The post office continued to exists and flourish, it just didn't get any cut of the new "cake".
Similarly, alt-coins which are genuinely distinctive in the features they support will give rise to new markets which are supported by those features.
If you just look at things in terms of "what is money doing now ? = that's what digital currencies will be doing in the future" then you're of the mindset that says eMail is going to displace the post office and nothing more. The mindset that doesn't see incidental conversation as a market, that doesn't see mobile texting as a market, that doesn't see online eCommerce help as a market, that doesn't see realtime gaming as a market.
In dismissing the altcoin landscape as a "distraction", Brian Armstrong has exposed his vision as being categorically of that mindset because "sidechains" are no more than a proxy for bitcoin at a technical level. What's required are proxies for bitcoin at a monetary level which are liberated from it at a technical level.
That is the altcoin domain.