State law defines the currency in which you have to pay taxes, however it does not define what currency you are allowed to use. At least not yet.
Yes, you can also use multiple currencies, but Legal Tender regulations regarding taxes, debts and public charges are enough to enforce people and businesses to use the the legal currency. In theory, you could refuse legal tender in US for sales, but you probably would be out of business pretty soon.
I can't see any "serious" organization able to create a competitive coin to Btc at the moment. The banks? Government? All too centralized.
I can't see any serious organizations getting into the crypto game either. I think that there are two possible reasons: a) Development is being done out of public sight ... b) The idea of private monetary systems is still too unstable and raw and further studies need to be done to compose a solid vision of the development process.
The core financial properties of bitcoin looks okay to me, apart from the public ledger being public. If Bitcoin is so overly simplistic and flawed, I suggest you build your own coin and let the free markets decide which coin it wants to use, right?
The core financial properties mostly look okay to those whose main interest in bitcoin is to gain wealth by buying low and selling high. The increasing deflation of bitcoin seems very ok to those whose goal is speculation.
I think that it is a nice suggestion that I should build my own coin. But sadly I don't have the time or resources to even compete with bitcoin, not to mention the probable upcoming coins that bitcoin won't be able to compete with.
That's the beauty of it all, if you don't like it then don't use it. Go use something else you think is better. Go to another forum and promote your own coin. No point being all superior and saying Bitcoin is bad and will crash etc...
Well, this is not exactly the first time when I was told to leave if I refuse to sing the same song of Bitcoin's Never-ending Success. But no, I wont leave, because I still consider the topic interesting and there are also people in the community who have interesting thoughts and who are not cheer-leading with religious fanaticism.
When the majority of the community tries to drive those away who think different or who criticize the mainstream knowledge, then the community can't be considered very progressive.
AFAIK, you have one week left before your crash predictions are proven totally imaginary.
It may come as a shock but predictions are imaginary. Predictions, or in this case speculations, can't be perceived with empirical proof and are theoretical in nature.
Also, one of my main points was that the Bitcoin market is highly manipulated and the wealth is highly concentrated, what makes the market highly unpredictable. I don't know how deep are he pockets of those in control or if their reach goes far enough to present false market data at the exchanges. Factors like that are important when speculating the future price at the bitcoin market. My speculations were done for entertainment, by considering the history of previous manipulation methods used, not for serious financial analysis. The unpredictable nature has led me to believe that I probably won't invest back before a similar situation emerges then we saw at the end of October where bigger plans of pumps are set in motion. And it wouldn't irritate me if the price will rise during this period, because to me it is the same as to get upset from observing the roulette table and cursing at yourself "Only if I would have put my money on red, I could have won...". Gambling is still gambling, even if you would have won..
Bitcoin is distributed consensus. The financial aspect of bitcoin is just the first system to attract infrastructure beyond mining. It's difficult to imagine a private company (such as Google) amassing hoards of other independent individuals and companies to run nodes and build services for their centralized crypto. The fact that bitcoin is at its heart a distributed consensus protocol that solves the Byzantine General's problem is too often overlooked. Money is not THE point of bitcoin. It is ONE point of bitcoin.
As far as competing with alt coins. Consider the network effect. TCP/IP is still the backbone of the internet today even though the protocol itself is not flexible. Systems and languages were/ are built on top of it. This is what is happening/ will happen with bitcoin.
When private companies like Google amass the software engineering talent needed to create a crypto that has clear quality advantages over bitcoin, then all the investors and supporters would come without google needing to amass them. Even Google brand value is important enough that if they would release a Googlecoin that is actually just another software clone of bitcoin, even then most of the money in bitcoin would quickly flow to the new googlecoin. Those who believe in bitcoin like it was their religion, tend to forget that serious investors are not like them and don't have any loyalty to bitcoin like they do. All their funds will quickly flow to the coin that has the best marketing potential.
It is out of place to compare Bitcoin to TCP/IP. TCP/IP was successful because it didn't have any important flaws in it's core, that should've been addressed. Not to mention that changing the internet protocol, without conflicting the existing system is a very hard task. But for value to flow from one crypto to another, just takes a week of transfers. And there really isn't a lot of development of important software that are built on the bitcoin protocol. Most important things that are build on top of bitcoin are the support services, but those support services are not dependent of bitcoin and can switch cryptos quickly when it is profitable to do so.