[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.