[rhino369]

It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady.

Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe.

Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.

[empath75]

I wouldn't discount network effects. I think a lot of people are going to build more and more services on top of the bitcoin blockchain rather than creating their own blockchain, just because it's convenient in terms of adoption and development and so on. And once those services are there, it's going to be hard to migrate them off. And that will eventually create some sustainable value to the coins.

As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo.

I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.

[rhino369]

Switching from bitcoin to litecoin seems trivial. I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin, especially since the current number of big users is pretty small. It seems like 99% of businesses who actually accept it are just using a payment processor, which could migrate to a new system overnight.

You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.

[gnaritas]

> there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.

That statement demonstrates you don't understand cyptocurrency at all. You're absolutely wrong, the difference between them is security, and that's something people value. And no, you can't trivially just substitute another crypto in place of bitcoin, other cryptos have neither the liquidity nor the security (which comes from the size of the network) to effectively move around the amount of money bitcoin can move around.

> I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin

Which means flatly you don't understand how cryptos work; no one who does would make that statement.