Thanks for your argumentation
What about the network effect? Meaning the value of the network goes up with the amount of participants?
Litecoin has faster transactions and if this alone is sufficiently important to a sufficiently large number of people then indeed it will succeed. But all those people look also at where can I use it? And then Litecoin is far inferior to bitcoin, even with faster transactions. So my argument is, for an altcoin to get those sufficient amount of people, it needs to offer many more advantages over the competitor. Comparable to facebook, windows, or ebay, the more amount of users, the more valuable it becomes and even with serious disadvantages over a new product/service, people will still chose for that due to the network effect.
One important advantage may build a niche market, but does not stand a chance to take over the far larger network. Many important advantages however do stand a chance to take over a much larger network.
I don't hold any altcoins because of reasons mentioned. However, I was also resistent to bitcoin and it took time for me to see the truth in the argumentations. I might miss something in the altcoins too, hence this discussion.
My view is that it is not the *number* of advantages that something offers, but the *value* of the advantage(s) that it offers. That is why I was somewhat dismissive of the "7 advantages" theory.
Network effect is absolutely critical to adoption. It is probably the most important advantage, *most* of the time. However there are exceptions, and empires with massive network effects have fallen in the past. Myspace (or Bebo or Friendster) had a much stronger network effect than facebook (when it first started) in terms of sheer numbers, but facebook was "cooler", dominated by students, and had a great user interface (very clean).
Speed of transactions is very important to the payments industry. 6 confirmations from the bitcoin network is too slow for many applications. It works fine for remittance and ecommerce, but doesn't really work at all for face-to-face retail. Do you want to stand around waiting for 10 minutes for your cup of coffee to be authorised?
Litecoin is probably still too slow for many of the applications that near-realtime transactions would open up. But it's faster than Bitcoin. And it has a decent level of network effect - there are plenty of exchanges between litecoin and bitcoin etc., and plenty of miners, so in my opinion it has a decent shot at hanging around for quite a while (if not overtaking Bitcoin).