Notwithstanding the bickering here which the users (and even most investors in a big success) of a CC are never going to read,
the bottom line is which aspects are required for a CC to scale up and compete with or overrun Bitcoin?
I am of the opinion that there is really no benefit to exerting great effort to try to stop P&Ds of CCs which are going no where, e.g. Dash and Ethereum. My goal has been to primarily to make sure that the technological issues have been properly documented; and this was mostly for myself, to make sure I don't make the same technological mistakes on my coin. Notice I've given up trying to comment in every Ethereum thread, because I've realized that gamblers love P&Ds and there is nothing I can or should do to fix the
Gambler's Fallacy psychosis/addiction.
I will posit that the breadth of the initial distribution of the coin is critical, because CC is not a widely used unit-of-account (i.e. chicken-or-egg dilemma) thus the HODLers are not going to be reinvesting their CC in new ventures and thus the CC won't redistribute out to employees of new ventures and thus the CC will become stagnant. With a great majority of the coins held and not recirculating, then the network effects will be limited to arbitrage opportunity cost, e.g. blowing bubbles in other altcoins. None of this will ignite a mass user ecosystem.
So it really doesn't matter if the lead developers find some way to mine 1% of the coins to reward themselves, if the other 99% of the coins are more widely distributed amongst those who will circulate them (and not just dump to HODLers as was the case for Auroracoin), than is the case for Bitcoin. Such an ideal distribution will run gangbusters over everything else. Of course if the insiders take double-digit percentages of the coins, then they have defeated their own long-term investment in network effects and thus should not be taken seriously. The problem with PoW coins distributed up to now, is they are not widely distributed amongst the ultimate users of a CC, which is why they haven't been able to gain sufficient network effects to challenge Bitcoin.
This will be the single most critical trait of a CC that will overtake Bitcoin, bar none.
I am literally opening my playbook for you.
Other than distribution, the other key aspect is whether the economic structure of the consensus algorithm can remain decentralized as the use of the currency scales up. So far, no CC has solved this dilemma.
And then I would posit that until you solve instant secure confirmations (which Iota doesn't have), you'll not be able to employ the CC in the markets where credit cards can't compete well.
Take all that together with the fact that Iota's consensus convergence depends either on all payees choosing to employ the same Monte Carlo judgement (which they are not required to do by the game theory) or on centralized servers with more PoW hashrate than the attackers, then for me Iota is doomed. But don't expect me to waste my time repeating it and trying to cure the Gambler's Fallacy. CfB and iotatoken have a right to extract from that phenomenon, but I just hope for their own sake they are aware of
the laws that regulate them even though I'd prefer there are no such laws.
