The single most important action you must do is choose the correct design for your crypto-currency, as I explained at the following short post:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.5749208All the promotion and hoopla is meaningless if your design is broken in a way that will give it all back to the power vacuum. And Bitcoin is so broken.
You are correct, it depends on the specific design. But there are many competing designs.
But Bitcoin is far from broken. It just works. It has it's flaws, but to me they are not that obtrusive. The system just works beautifully...BUT one must understand HOW it works, or they risk losing their funds. A perfect example of this is wallet maintenance and backups. People think certain wallet backups are still good but in fact are useless. People load up a paper wallet, spend a few coins, then just cross off say "50 BTC" and replace it with "45 BTC" and put the paper wallet away, forgetting about the wallet they've created on their PC or their web based wallet...and ended up with a rude shock after discovering later that they've lost the remainder of the balance on their paper wallet because they didn't understand change addresses.
The design that interests me the most is the design of Quarkcoin. Some call it a scam, but I beg to differ. 5/6ths of the coins that will be minted over the next 50 years were minted in a 6 month period. This gives it a huge stability advantage to those who are new to the cryptocurrency market. Most other cryptos are still being mined with an eventual finite supply.
To me a finite supply will eventually cause the Zilger-Hubermann loss-pattern-diffusion effect whereby the critical mass will reach its threshold much sooner than expected, and then subsequently collapse. Think the South Sea bubble. People assign Bitcoin value, so therefore it has value. But if it becomes virtually impossible to obtain new coins after a certain time frame passes, then it may well become useless. With Bitcoin and it's very finite supply of probably LESS than 20M coins (we can claim that more than 1M coins were destroyed through HDD failures, newbies who didn't understand change addresses, forgotten passphrases to encrypted wallets, lost wallet files, backup mistakes, formatted hard drives with forgotten wallets, or indeed anything that results in irrevocable loss of private keys, you could even add lost/damaged paper wallets to this list). A loss of 1M coins, you can almost bank on that. I'd be willing to bet everything I have that 1 million bitcoins were irrevocably lost by mistakes ranging from the common and simple to the rare and complex.
Bitcoin is definitely flawed. I make no bones about it. But so is virtually every one of the other cryptocurrencies...even Quarkcoin, which is my favourite crypto, is flawed in some way...but it depends on whether those flaws will affect the long-term appreciation and adoption into the mainstream usage over time.
To me, the ultimate cryptocurrency will have every feature required of a cryptocurrency for every individual ranging from the dumbest to the smartest - that is, all features FULLY open source, password protection options, wallet encryption options, backup options, paper wallet and key print out options, HD deterministic wallets that only require ONE master private key to secure and maintain, mining features fully built in that are fully optional to any user, and with programmable access to direct banking features, such as exchanges and peer-to-peer financial systems, such as p2p banks and of course bitcoin, but where one can sell or purchase this cryptocurrency with full fiat exchange.
If one could achieve this in a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin would be in an uphill battle against this new cryptocurrency. That's the truth and for bitcoiners it might be terrifying, but those are the facts. C'est la vie. I'm sure bitcoiners could produce something such as what I've described above. And in fact, with Armory and Electrum, they've done just that to a certain extent, but we still have a long way to go before we could say that Bitcoin is a completely finished product. It's still a ways to go, but I am certain we will get there, but it will be a slow process, with many hurdles to cross, and of course this will happen over time.
