When I tell people I work on Bitcoin full-time, a somewhat common reaction is "Really? I thought Bitcoin was finished, what do you work on?"
I spend half my development time working on new stuff (or testing new stuff that other people have submitted), but the other half I spend trying to anticipate problems or reacting to problems that are reported. That work tends to be unseen, partly because we want to keep problems quiet while we fix them and partly because quietly anticipating/fixing problems minimizes the 'lulz' that attackers might enjoy if every single-node-DoS attack caused us to run around like chickens with our heads cut off.
Anyway, good developers are hard to find, and one of the reasons I'm not thrilled by all of the AlternaCoins is because I'd rather a good developer help make Bitcoin better rather than spend their time with the busy-work of cross-porting the latest Bitcoin fixes to some other codebase. I would guess that some of the developers of the alternative chains underestimated the amount of work it takes to nurture them and keep them healthy. Maybe that will change when Bitcoin is truly mature and has dealt with another year or two or six of attacks and scaling issues...
I truly don't mean this to sound like a threat, but I think some of the blockchains that have been chugging along running on an ancient forked version of the Bitcoin codebase will be attacked; pretty soon we'll be fully disclosing the denial-of-service bugs that prompted the 0.6.2/0.6.3 releases, and it is highly likely somebody will decide to play with exploit code on a vulnerable chain.
I wish people would find more constructive things to do with their time, but I wish I could fly and never get old like Peter Pan, too.
To be honest Gavin, I think it's a question of Ownership. Bitcoin hit GPU mining before it hit mainstream- and thus those who weren't early adopters feel left out. Sentimental? Yes, but not irrelevant. If the cost to entry is a serious GPU farm, many casual people who would over time get seriously committed if they had a chance, are lost. Bitcoin is great for all the reasons we all know, but for ordinary people (especially those not fond of math) selling them on bitcoin is like selling them a piece of the moon.
One could make the argument that if the wave of individuals who got involved in alternacoins like LTC (thanks to Bitcoins PR) is greater then the original Bitcoin early adopter crew, there is a chance that in the long run a Larger AlternaCoin community might make a more viable concurrent currency system.
By day I'm a reasonably well known fashion photographer- hardly the kind of guy you would expect to get involved. But here I am, and I'm mining LTC because I can. I also have an incentive to spend the summer learning to program so I can build apps that use LTC to raise the value of the LTC I've already mined. Hopefully LTC remains somewhat viable for people to mine long enough to get an even larger group of invested new-early adopters.
We all like bitcoin- no doubt about it, but for me to have to go through a still very lengthy (bank transfer to exchange) or costly (bitInstant is not cheap) process to get bitcoins just to turn around and buy things I could buy anyway with a credit card- doesn't rock my boat in quite the same way.
I understand the why/how of Bitcoin, but I think a sense of ownership that coins like LTC still offer is very powerful.
Imagine this- The United States was conquered al'la Manifest Destiny in many ways thanks to the free opportunity of ownership that the "west" offered. Gold rush or land rush, the idea was to distribute potential wealth as widely as possible so that you suddenly had a great number of people invested in the idea of "America". I lived and studied in great depth and many years in the former Communist states and a key principle in converting Communists countries to Capitalist societies was redistribution of wealth. It wasn't perfect by a long shot, but it got people invested in a sense of ownership in a free society.
Coins are quite the same. They need to be distributed as widely as possible to ensure a user base of support- the primary mechanism of this is mining. BTC is already relatively elite to mine, but I think it's questionable if it grew it's user base large enough prior to becoming relatively elite.
An alt Coin like LTC has an opportunity to build on BTC's success and gather a wider user base while (hopefully) keeping mining an option for more users, longer.
In the end, I think it's not about the coin- it's about the IDEA of bitcoin. If one succeeds more or less then another it's somewhat irrelevant- if any of them succede it's a victory for the philosophy. That's more important no?
