Realistically does bitcoin have any competition ?

[rscholey]

I understand there are 600 other coins and that banks might be involved in trying to put in place there own mechanisms based on the blockchain but now that bitcoin has become as big as it has is there even a 10% chance that anything could replace bitcoin in the next few years.

[mallard]

A lot of people here like Monero.
Ethereum is quite nice too.

[rscholey]

Do those two have caps on the number of coins? Without a cap or some limitations like bitcoin has then is it not the case that developers can go on printing money (mining coins) at whatever rate they want forever. 

[Lauda]

A lot of people here like Monero.
Ethereum is quite nice too.

Let me bold the important part. Outside of here barely anyone has any interest or has heard of them. Ethereum is using a marketing scheme itself "Bitcoin 2.0". Realistically Bitcoin has currently zero competition. Litecoin has some people that occasionally start pumping it, however it usually returns to normal levels.

I understand there are 600 other coins and that banks might be involved in trying to put in place there own mechanisms based on the blockchain but now that bitcoin has become as big as it has is there even a 10% chance that anything could replace bitcoin in the next few years.

The market cap of all those coins combined does not come close to Bitcoin.

Do those two have caps on the number of coins? Without a cap or some limitations like bitcoin has then is it not the case that developers can go on printing money (mining coins) at whatever rate they want forever. 

Are you talking about POS coins? No, nobody can "print out" coins at the rate at which they desire. They can only do this if they mess around with the source code and you decide to run it.

[cbeast]

Bitcoin is the standard, but its likely that a large corporation or superpower will clone one of the existing coin schemes and sell its branding using the corporate owned media.

[randy8777]

altcoins at this point by far aren't competetion for bitcoin. but that doesn't mean there is no chance that at some point in the future bitcoin gets replaced by something better. technology improves all the time.

[dothebeats]

I'd honestly say that there are no serious competitions for bitcoin around the cryptoworld. Most altcoins base their concepts and functionalities on bitcoin and some have either improved it or made it more efficient than those functionalities existing in bitcoin already. Monero might garnered some unique interest from people here, though I think that there is more interest building up on bitcoin recently. Same with Ethereum and Litecoin. Though these coins have some significant interest coming from bitcoin, we cannot deny the fact that money is heavily poured into bitcoin and its blockchain technology.

[NorrisK]

It all depends on how bitcoin evolves. If every step of its evolution goes like the max block size, bitcoin will be overtaken fast.

Adaptation is key.

[Mickeyb]

I would say only possibly Ethereum at the moment and those are only expectations since the Ethereum devs still have to deliver the promised. But Ethereum does have a lot of hype around itself even in the outside world which no other alt does have at the moment. Just look at the last 10 days and the news articles and how many banks are actually looking into Bitcoin and Ethereum.

On the other side, some may argue that Ethereum and Bitcoin are not competition at all since the main use of ETH are smart contracts. So in a essence, these two are complementing each other.

[ajareselde]

I understand there are 600 other coins and that banks might be involved in trying to put in place there own mechanisms based on the blockchain but now that bitcoin has become as big as it has is there even a 10% chance that anything could replace bitcoin in the next few years.

imho, bitcoin has no real competitor for now. Many or all altcoins are purely created to make dev the financial gain, and not out of an idea of giving it's users what bitcoin offers for free.
And not only that, there's also certain advancement bitcoin as such can make, meaning it can evolve into something much grater if there ever is need of that, sxo there's no real point
of having alts, other than to test out different paths bitcoin should take in the future.

cheers

[stingers]

I understand there are 600 other coins and that banks might be involved in trying to put in place there own mechanisms based on the blockchain but now that bitcoin has become as big as it has is there even a 10% chance that anything could replace bitcoin in the next few years.

No other coin  is as popular for certain infamous things and bitcoin is the one with most negative publicity( this helps in gaining media attention), and so really I feel that other coin can gain a lot of market cap but they will never come close to bitcoin.

[Mickeyb]

It all depends on how bitcoin evolves. If every step of its evolution goes like the max block size, bitcoin will be overtaken fast.

Adaptation is key.

Yes I kinda agree. The decision and consensus making process needs to speed up, but also don't forget that we are innovating here. Maybe this is the only way, to have this kind of decision making process that takes this long. Don't forget that this is the first real decentralized process of this magnitude, this is all still a huge experiment. So let's see everything, how will this work out.

@rscholey: I don't know about the Monero but Ethereum will be limited between 90-100 million ethers by the newest change to the POS.

[dothebeats]

I would say only possibly Ethereum at the moment and those are only expectations since the Ethereum devs still have to deliver the promised. But Ethereum does have a lot of hype around itself even in the outside world which no other alt does have at the moment. Just look at the last 10 days and the news articles and how many banks are actually looking into Bitcoin and Ethereum.

On the other side, some may argue that Ethereum and Bitcoin are not competition at all since the main use of ETH are smart contracts. So in a essence, these two are complementing each other.

Ethereum can be a possible competitor, but hype alone won't take the cut and as you said, the devs should deliver first before people could actually take it as a serious alternative to bitcoin.

-snip-
On the other side, some may argue that Ethereum and Bitcoin are not competition at all since the main use of ETH are smart contracts. So in a essence, these two are complementing each other.

Yep, ETH can be used ideally in smart contracts and not as a mainstream currency as to what bitcoin is intended to be. That kinda explains why there wouldn't be no tight competition between the two.

[JeWay]

I think Bitcoin doesn't has a competitor right now, cause they are different|they're not same thing.

[GriffinHeart]

Everyone is recommending Monero and Ethereum, Monero being ~0.50 US cents while Ethereum being ~0.80 US cents.
I think everyone is forgetting Litecoin. 2 USD per coin. Monero and Ethereum both have potential, but litecoin is much more per coin than both Eth and Monero.

[Wary]

There is no real competitors at the moment, but it will change soon. Before altcoins were created by a lonely geek in mom's basement, but now big players getting interest in blockchain technologies. States, big banks, big tech corporations. Using their huge financial and human resources, they can create really good altcoins and using their huge customer base they can make them popular. And they can move much faster than bitcoin, because they don't have bitcoin's governance problems.  Even relatively small competitors, such as Russian Qiwi's rublecoins, may overtake bitcoin.

[KhalDrago]

Everyone is recommending Monero and Ethereum, Monero being ~0.50 US cents while Ethereum being ~0.80 US cents.
I think everyone is forgetting Litecoin. 2 USD per coin. Monero and Ethereum both have potential, but litecoin is much more per coin than both Eth and Monero.

monero and litecoin are pure shit..why? they can only exist in the crypto space..no person outside this dark circle can or will use these coins. litecoin isnt meant to be for the average person..from the lack of their development u can see they only care about trading the coin and not expanding user base..tyhe coin doesnt even have its own ios wallet.

[reRaise]

The startups are disrupting markets including: Cloud Storage; Smart Contracts; Social Networking; Anti-Conterfeiting; Governance; Digital Identity; Supply Chain; Art & Ownership; Prediction Markets; and Internet of Things.

The companies are: Applied Blockchain, Augur (@AugurProject), Bitnation (@MyBitNation), Bitproof.io (@bitproofio), BlockVerify (@BlockVerify), Chimera, Colu (@coluplatform), Etherparty (@etherparty_io), everledger (@everledgerio), Filament (@FilamentHQ), Filecoin (@MineFilecoin), FollowMyVote (@FollowMyVote), Gems (@getgemsorg), Monegraph (@Monegraph), Onename (@onename), Otonomos (@Otonomos), ShoCard (@getShoCard), Storj (@storjproject), Swarm (@swarmfund), Synereo (@Synereo) thingchain (@thingchain), Tierion (@Tierion), Tradle (@tradles), Trustatom (@trustatom), and Verisart (@verisart).

[ranochigo]

Possibly not. There are lots of companies that accepts Bitcoin as a payment method and not most of the alt coins. Adoption is one of the factor that influence users to use them. There isn't much argument to most of the altcoins ie blocktime, anonymity. Bitcoin can achieve most of those easily. The exchange rate is much more volatile than Bitcoin too.

[Q7]

I still hold on to my belief that if someday bitcoin fails for that matter, it will bring down the trust people are having towards cryptocurrencies. That includes all the other altcoins.