Will Bitcoin be surpassed in value by an alternate cryptocurrency and when?

[other_side]

Will Bitcoin be surpassed in value by an alt coin and when?

Yes. In the next 5 years.

[stash]

In 5-10 years something like Ripple IMHO.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Here's a question: Gold as money 'evolved' from the barter system, as a better way for people to transact with one another. Silver also found its way into use as a means of transaction/store of value. There is arguably no difference between silver and gold in terms of fundamental properties which make for a sound form of money. Why do we therefore have these two 'precious' metals?

The constraints of physical coinage.  The smallest gold coin in the US was roughly the size of a dime and was worth more than a laborers daily wage.  Imagine Joe Smith got paid his dime sized gold coin (about 2 grams) and went into a bar for a drink which was 1/10th of a gram.  How exactly was he going to spend it?  Were people going to mint 1/10th gram coins which were about 1/20th the size of a dime?  

You can easily have the tiniest amount of gold in a plastic wrapper. Hence one could wrap infinitesimal amounts of gold safely and trade it without the need of a minted coin.

Circa 1700?   Gold is no longer used as a circulating currency.  When it was used as "money", the technology needed to mint, authenticate, and transport sub gram gold coins simply didn't exist.

[jinni]

Here's a question: Gold as money 'evolved' from the barter system, as a better way for people to transact with one another. Silver also found its way into use as a means of transaction/store of value. There is arguably no difference between silver and gold in terms of fundamental properties which make for a sound form of money. Why do we therefore have these two 'precious' metals?

The constraints of physical coinage.  The smallest gold coin in the US was roughly the size of a dime and was worth more than a laborers daily wage.  Imagine Joe Smith got paid his dime sized gold coin (about 2 grams) and went into a bar for a drink which was 1/10th of a gram.  How exactly was he going to spend it?  Were people going to mint 1/10th gram coins which were about 1/20th the size of a dime?  

You can easily have the tiniest amount of gold in a plastic wrapper. Hence one could wrap infinitesimal amounts of gold safely and trade it without the need of a minted coin.

Circa 1700?   Gold is no longer used as a circulating currency.  When it was used as "money", the technology needed to mint, authenticate, and transport sub gram gold coins simply didn't exist.

Sorry for the side-track, I was obviously too tired and didn't read your post properly 

I was just thinking of the people in the US (can't find a link) with tiny amounts of gold and a laminating machine campaigning for using gold as a currency, but they are clearly irrelevant in how there came to be a use for silver in coinage back in the day.

[raid_n]

I believe there is a firm place for alt-coins as a speculative tool, some maybe even as a real alternative to BTC (Supporting multiple cryptocurrencies in payment apps and infrastructure should be easy to manage)
In my opinion the less Bitcoin will swing in its value the more speculators will move to alts.

As for innovations in altcoins that may give them a large advantage over bitcoin: Bitcoin solves probabilistic agreement on the blockchain. That agreement can also be used to add changes. (say a majority of the last x blocks contain a new protocol revision so that serves as a confirmation that the new protocol is now the accepted standard). There still is a lot of potential for interesting upgrades and extensions. In principle Bitcoin could support multiple different proof of work algorithms concurrently. It may even make sense to introduce a hybrid proof of stake model (IMHO Proof of Stake requires some form of probabilistic timing constraint on block creation time). You don't need an inflationary cryptocurrency for proof of stake. The transaction fees may be incentive enough (maybe give out a percentage of the Transaction fees based on the stake and the rest is awarded to the next PoW block?)

Time will tell but the beauty about Bitcoin is that it is actually rather simple in its design but very effective.
People wanting faster block creation times do not realize that this actually adds a lot of stability and should NOT be changed.
Proof of Work is extremely elegant as it acts as a synchronizer and timer for a network with an unknown number of participants.

Any changes to these elements may introduce more headaches than advantages in the long run