In order to beat Bitcoin, you much provide something that Bitcoin can't do which is more popular and has greater network effects.
Bitcoin for the moment owns the store-of-value and slow-large medium-of-exchange functions of crypto currency, and that is unlikely to change unless Bitcoin so screws up the block size issue that the market is forced to choose a new block chain for these properties of money.
However, the instant-micro medium-of-exchange function of crypto currency is still wide open. Ditto on chain privacy and anonymity, which appears to be a two horse race between Monero and Z(ero)cash, but I have
my doubts as to how popular/practical overt privacy and anonymity will be. Bitcoin is
hoping for Lightning Networks (<-- click the Reddit link at the linked post) but LN requires large block sizes for garbage collections spikes and it realistically can't allow anyone to pay anyone, plus it is a centralization paradigm to be owned by large corporate servers. V(anilla)Cash is pitching some
insecure Zero Time shit that can't scale. Bitshares and Dash are pitching some more flawed shit, and even I discovered that InstantX's white paper had a high school level math error in its security calculation which made it seem much more secure than it is.
Ethereum has no users,
no chance of scaling decentralized, and no one has even shown that any Dapps are important and/or can't be done in another way. I pointed out the prior day that
Augur is insecure.
Market cap is irrelevant if it is not sustained, because P&Ds are easy for whales to conduct by buying from themselves, including constructing
fake buy walls.
So yes I think Bitcoin can be beat. But it won't be easy. And the chances are slim. You actually have to have a plan for stimulating instant microtransactions medium-of-exchange adoption. It won't just happen by magic and you won't be able to just employ the mass media to dazzle the gullible tinfoil speculator junkies for the userbase since Bitcoin already captured them.
