The tragedy of these forks is that they're trying to bleed off a few hundred or thousand devotees from a small segment of the tiniest corner of the most marginalized and obscure offshoot of the almost fractally invisible group of geeks and libertarians... and they don't even seem to realize it. Bitcoin just barely has enough people to sustain what bare and sparse economic activity we have. There's not enough to go around for all these forks. I guess the long-term strategy is to eventually convert the entire bitcoin userbase to their own version.
That's fine with me. May the best cryptocurrency win. Problem is, I don't see how solidcoin can attract anyone who is actually worth having. Most people who contribute something significant are already invested in bitcoin (and I mean emotionally, not financially here). Speculators will be attracted to solidcoin but since they don't actually do anything, nobody cares.
Reading those hyperbolic posts the solidcoin folks make on their website really turns me off, though. Have a tiny bit of self-respect, will you? If your clone is good enough it's good enough, nobody is listening to what you have to say about bitcoin, believe me.
Agreed. Replacing Bitcoin will require the new protocol to be better by a wide margin, and obviously so.