Topic: For any crypto-coins to have long term future, you need an ecosystem around it (Read 819 times)

Effectively, an ecosystem is needed to make the crypto-asset successful. Most successful portals have prevailed by building an ecosystem that backs-up around themselves, thereby ensuring that trustworthy data can be provided to interested parties who want to audit the system. It’s like having a sphere of influence that will serve as the eyes of the many nodes functioning.

I think the fundamental point is that it must have some unique utility that is inadequately or not all addressed by other cryptos. That's a pre-requisite for an ecosystem to get built around it in the first place. That's why ethereum has done so well for instance, and why z-cash might.

These ecosystems are currently developing spontaneously, being fueled by consumer demand. When demand occurs, supply appears.

Bitcoin is a respectful currency, but we are only beginning to see the sprouting of its protocol. These systems that you speak of that currently support bitcoin are compatible also with arriving currencies. It's not like each currency will need its own distinct ecosystem. A merchant does not have a separate POS device for each payment card.

We can get a glimpse of the future now by observing the ShapeShift project or the Litecoin integration at Coinbase. People by their very nature seek out diversity and choice. Moving forward, we're going to see new coins leveraging existing bitcoin infrastructure; again all driven by consumer demand.

Look at automobiles for example: There are many makes and models, yet they all use the same roads, the same petrol stations, have 4 wheels and a motor. Bitcoin is like the first automobile. And the infrastructure being built to support it, will also support the newly arriving makes and models.

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Bitcoin is first of all, a better gold. Bitcoin as an actual currency where you buy everyday stuff is secondary, and will come later on. Points of sale (as in physical shops accepting Bitcoin) is the last phase of adoption. By then, people owning 2 figure BTCs will be rich and shopping will all be done in mBTC, and the price will be more stable due the high marketcap. We will also have Lightning to provide for massive amounts of volume.

Im not sure what will happen to alts, im only holding BTC long term.

The good publicity is that Bitcoin may be hitting 650 soon. The bad publicity: price volatility I prefer it to hold stable at a certain price point and slowly creep upwards just like traditional investments.

The core team is too fragmented and they are divided over ideals. Pragmatism versus idealism. I'll prefer the former.

OK, that is one... now compared to Bitcoin that is like a drop in the ocean at the moment. We have a huge head start above any other crypto currencies out there, and the gap is just growing bigger

by the day. The other thing is, many merchants and services have previously started to accept other Alt coins, but the support for it died out and they burned their fingers. Most of them are back

with Bitcoin as the primary payment option. It is becoming a household name, because of good and bad publicity.  

It is basically the law of life, get better or die. Bitcoin has the potential to evolve. But community needs to understand that bitcoin has problems.
Waiting too long or sweeping them under the rug is not gonna help us build the best cryptocurrency.

This seems like a very gloom view. From this angle, Bitcoin must innovate or get replaced.

Remember Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook?

Yes I agree new altcoins come up with new technical concepts that will drive the thirst for knowledge, just like how academia dive into research to advance humanity. But if there is no end goal to get more people to adopt a certain altcoin part from trading it for more Bitcoins, then what is the long term goal?

They really don't. Altcoins stand on the technical side. They all share the same common basis (Bitcoin) and try to improve over technical aspects, protocol, aspects, etc. These coins aren't really after the ecosystem and commercial side of things. Their purpose is to give ideas for Bitcoin development and to try to compete with it at the technical level.

It's a bit rare to see a website accepting some altcoin and not Bitcoin. Exceptions are websites who are closely related to the altcoin in question or even ran by someone deeply involved with it, or by the developers.

Because all cryptos are based on bitcoin, it is a simple matter of simply switching the bitcoin infrastructure to the new crypto. So Bitpay could start taking Ether, the bitcoin wallets could start taking various cryptos as well and so on. We've already seen the start of this with Coinbase adding Litecoin and Ether - they have 2.7 million users, who can now easily switch to another crypto if they want.

To bring up the MySpace/Facebook analogy again - both were functioning on the internet and were internet compatible, which is why the migration from one to another was so easy. If they were operating on a separate closed network, the migration would have been harder. Because the basic bones of all cryptos are the same, it is simple to adapt bitcoin's infrastructure to a new coin. The users are all on the same internet, they are all on the same social media (reddit), they are all familiar with how the basic wallets work, the basic structure of all the alts is the same, it is simply a case of using a different address...

Shapshift.io's altcoin integration for payment to sites that accepts Bitcoins is a good start. But Shapeshift had its share of security woes too: http://www.coindesk.com/digital-currency-exchange-shapeshift-claims-hack-inside-job/

How many merchants do you know, that accepts eth? Compare this to the network of merchants and people who owns Bitcoin. This network has been built over several years and a trust relationship have been

formed with the individuals and groups. Bitcoin has proven that it can stand against most attacks thrown at it, not something Eth can say... The scale of Bitcoin compared to these other Alt coin networks are

not even in the same league... Let's just leave it there. 

I don't think any other alt coin will be able to emulate the success and ecosystem Bitcoin has achieved till now. Bitcoin has the chance to become an established and globally recognized digital currency and a lot of respectable companies worldwide are already making efforts to accept it as a means of conducting business in their infrastructures. Do we need any other alt coins at all and for what? I guess only speculators and traders are interested in dealing with alt coins and people use them to get a quick profit with pump and dump schemes that will essentially render the value volatile and I guess serious businesses would not want to integrate something so inconsistent in their systems. Bitcoin, although not perfect, can function perfectly fine for what's required by commerce and I don't see how alt coins will make it even close to what Bitcoin can offer to online & offline businesses.

Yes. Usage statistics and demographics are important. This is the downside of Bitcoins. Nobody knows the demographics, unlike Paypal who can supply key partners the usage patterns.

Another point to note is that market cap != usage statistics. There are coins with huge market cap but with non-existent ecosystem so essentially the users are just circle jerking to themselves and enjoying the pump and dump manipulation.

No coin comes close to Bitcoin. The rest of altcoins are struggling to justify their own existence, so they are limited to very niche use cases which will eventually all be covered by Bitcoin itself through sidechains. Honestly Bitcoin has 0 competition.

Bitcoin itself still has a long way to go, I'd like to see them have as much or more merchants than Paypal for example.
Luckily there are more and more businesses willing to offer Bitcoin payments.

That said, companies are not going to start accepting altcoins over Bitcoin unless they can show greater usage statistics.

I'm not entirely sure if Bitcoin can fulfill all the things you mentioned in the first post. However I would really like to see it happen - Bitcoin being used because it is needed. Well, if Bitcoin can really fulfill all those things, what do the other Altcoin do? I personally think that those Altcoin still stand a chance in the market. Just like how Paypal and Ebay still have competitors.

Bitcoin has prominent payment gateways such as Bitpay, secured wallet service such as BitGo, and hardware wallets such as Trenzos. We also saw prominent sites with APIs linking up with banks, a mature community such as localbitcoins and a list of merchants such as Dell have accepted Bitcoins as a currency. These are the ecosystem that make an entity successful.

We are looking at a repeat of business cycle here. We look at Paypal, eBay, and Amazon. These successful portals have successfully build an ecosystem around themselves, ranging from payment integration, online shopping, and they are almost one of the cornerstones of the internet and laid the foundation of e-commerce. Many small business entities have a business model that is tightly integrated around these internet giants. Even hobbyists who uses internet as a sideline source of income embraces Paypal and eBay for their needs.

Even Apple has successfully build a sphere of influence and many citizens depended on them for a living - we are talking about Apple Mac experts, Film makers who uses Final Cut and a new breed of Apple iOS developers. All of them depended on Apple for a living.

If we were to bring the same rational to the realm of cryptocurrencies, it is not likely any of the new coins (including Ether) is going to be successful in the near future unless there is an ecosystem around them. Building an ecosystem is unlike constructing a new building. It requires a vision and fulfillment of a need. So, if Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency is able to fulfill this need, where will other coins stand?