Anyone who has spent 5 seconds thinking about it realizes that if LTC or whatever scam-coin succeeds then all crypto-currency fails.
So if BMW wins in terms of car sales, all car sales will plummet and the industry will die? Better rethink this over.
People keep making this analogy. People who make this analogy are not good at analogies.
The best coin will succeed. There is no need for one single coin only. In that respect, the analogy applies.
Sigh. So, let's say that there are 100 people in the world that want cars. Like, tops (simple explanation here). Let's say that one car company sells all those 100 their cars. If a new company starts, then yes, the value of the first company will be diminished. Now, in the real world the market is continuing to expand and the first company has many opportunities to make new products, expand the market, ect. None the less, the one thing we CAN say is that people are pretty convinced of the value of the car and will continue to want one, no matter who sells it to them. Hell, if I buy a car and two weeks later the company I bought the car from goes under, it's still a car that works. It drives me places.
And that is where your terrible analogy falls apart. LTC is a poor, script-kiddies copy of BTC in every important way. It does nothing significantly different than BTC. At the same time, there are people investing and working hard of getting people to adopt crypto-currency as viable, sustainable, and important. You know what undermines this? LTC. People are smart enough to realize that if any two-bit script-kiddie can just make up an alt-coin that actively devalues their investment, they're not gonna buy it. Who wants to play the "Oh, this new crypto-currency is better so you better dump everything right now and switch!" game? What good is an investment in LTC if, one-year from now, super-LTC gets released and does everything regular LTC does but maybe slightly different. What good is an investment in super-LTC if Mega-LTC comes out a year after that and does things just a little different.
And that, sir, is why your analogy is terrible.
Let's first start with your initial argument: '
Anyone who has spent 5 seconds thinking about it realizes that if LTC or whatever scam-coin succeeds then all crypto-currency fails'.
First of all, it contains a contradiction. If all crypto-currency fails, then LTC would fail as well, but that did not happen since your statement poses the element that LTC (or whatever
scam-coin) shoud have succeeded for your statement to apply. But let's leave that as it is.
The analogy made with the car industry is to bring forward a though experiment why an industry as a whole would fail if one of the market players provides for the best solution at a given time? That industry collapse is not happening. It is quite the opposite: the industry has developed just fine under heavy competition. Weak companies vanished while strong companies flourished. The current players have to remain improving themselves and their products or lose out to the competition. The beneficiary is the customer. I fail to see why LTC succeeding would mean the end of crypto-currency.
That was the analogy made.
That's also were it stops, because a car is a single object that can be used stand-alone. You are quite right there. Crypto-currencies can be made in thousand variants but in order to be useful, they need to be used by a certain number of people. There is no use sending a McCorvic_Coin if you are running the only client of McCorvic_Coin.
But that still does not explain why the victory of LTC would mean the end of crypto-currency.
Wait, another bad analogy coming up: fiat-currency. We have tons of them, also in different varieties. Did not collapse, although we are getting there
The simple fact that more than one type of currency exists, does not warrant the collapse of currency itself. The only thing that matters is use by people. Probably,
sufficient use by people. I won't get into the history of fiat money and the practical matters thereof, but we can safely conclude that there are many types of fiat currency floating around without a collapse of fiat currency. So that does not seem to support your argument either.
Still digging a little deeper, I think that Bitcoin is actually
meant to have competition. And that is where the analogy with the car industry, albeith limited; I give you that, comes up again. Competition can make or break Bitcoin. If it breaks Bitcoin, something else will take over. Bitcoin must be subject to competition (and be improved) because its source code is freely available. If Bitcoin cannot survive competition, it would not have lasted until today. The very essence of its existence proves that it can handle competition fine (until now). LTC may take over (although I doubt it; not innovative enough), and if so it will be because the people have chosen so by their actions.
People will chose their crypto-currency of choice with their feet. It could be Bitcoin, but also Litecoin, Namecoin or PPCoin. Many practical matters will influence these choices, as is the case (duck: another analogy...) with me using euro instead of USD, while it is no problem for me to exchange these two currencies if needed. Preferences shift over time: it happens all the time and this will not be different for free market phenomenons like crypto-currency. It is not a given that such shift in preference will lead to the collapse of crypto-currency as a whole (one will be less valued over time and the other valued more).
The important features that Bitcoin as granddaddy gives us (near free, decentralized, uncontrollable and instant payments all over the world) will live on now that the cat is out of the bag. Whether Bitcoin will survive or not is not the question. In my perception it is not
which coin will survive that is at stake, but finding a good, wide spread and long lasting use for crypto-currency's unique features. Like in getting your mom to use them (and yes, that is a very long road ahead
)
I would very much like Bitcoin to succeed, but if better coins appear, nothing is holding back the public (including me) to jump on another train. The first who can manage to develop a coin that has the additional feature of instant payment (without 6 confirmations needed) while being as secure as Bitcoin, has a real prospect of having a winner within reach. Either Bitcoin assumes this innovation, or is left for dead. It's nature in the digital realms....
The public does not always chose the best solution and may chose LTC's features in the end over Bitcoin. That's not for us to decide but by the one's making a crypto-currency a success: its users as a whole.
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