What would a new coin need to overtake bitcoin

[ashapasa]

Ok we all love bitcoin  , but there are hundreds of newcoins and not all of them are crapcoins. Bitcoin is the innovator and trailblazer but they are usually not the ones to succeed in the long term. What features that are improved over bitcoin will allow a new coin to ultimately dethrone the king.

1) faster transactions
2) Lower transaction cost
3) anonymity
4) premined pos which saves energy
5) you get the idea
 

[Bitcoiner88]

You will not be able to overcome the bitcoin since bitcoin was first and usualy whoever is first and pioneering in something is always the one who they look up to.

But everything is possible in the long-term.

[notbatman]

What are Ripples?

[ashapasa]

people say its a scam  , but I think its centralized, premined money transmitter. I dont see ripple taking the crown, see the volume in coinmarketcap 

[ashapasa]

You will not be able to overcome the bitcoin since bitcoin was first and usualy whoever is first and pioneering in something is always the one who they look up to.

But everything is possible in the long-term.

Napster was first, so was mosiac and myspace 

[Beliathon]

It's not going to happen this decade, forget about it.

Bitcoin is organic, adaptive. Like a virus. You don't need another adaptive form of money when you already have one.

[Melbustus]

...
Napster was first, so was mosiac and myspace 

Bitcoin is not the first digital-cash (see Digi-Cash, eGold). But it *is* the first digital cash to get it right, via decentralized consensus. That's what really generates the network effect and builds users and value.

Note that digital cash has been theorized for decades, and attempted in the late-80s/90s, but everyone (including those employing crypto-techniques) did it in some centralized fashion because achieving real-world viable distributed consensus was a decades-long unsolved problem in computer-science. Until bitcoin came along. Blockchain consensus is the innovation. The stuff in OP's list is just detail, and bitcoin is ultimately flexible.

Now that the fundamental problem is solved, in a domain with very strong network effects (money), and it works pretty well, it's going to be difficult if not impossible for another digital-cash system to dominate. The history of networking has largely been that "good enough" causes significant infrastructure to be built around it quickly, users adopt it cuz it works, and the benefits to switching are often not worth it. And that's without bitcoin's monetary incentive.

[g4c]

It's not going to happen this decade, forget about it.

Bitcoin is organic, adaptive. Like a virus. You don't need another adaptive form of money when you already have one.

There is one weakness you have overlooked.

But you have come very close to it with your answer!

Indeed Bitcoin is a virus, offering symbiotic returns to its hosts as it gobbles up hash operations.

If miners can be encouraged to run SHA256 for something more profitable than Bitcoin then bitcoin will die quickly, it's a winner takes all game.

I dunno, ohhh.. lets say a government backed and regulated coin.

Of course there would be die-hard miners thinking "if bticoin goes down I go down with her" but I'll bet there would be many who behind closed doors just couldn't resist the higher return they get by joining the "worldcoin" pool.

In a nutshell, there is a chance that bitcoin will get replaced.

To say otherwise is an ignorance of game theory in which it is VERY difficult to engineer certainty.

Governments tend to be very good at game theory (it's what they do).

[g4c]

"What would a new coin need to overtake bitcoin"

Simple: Higher profit for miners. Even if the new coin uses has more centralisation, think one giant super pool.

Might need to be substantially higher to cover the costs of broken ideals (less or no liberty) and less freedom, but chump change for a government.

Money doesn't talk, it swears.

[aminorex]

If miners can be encouraged to run SHA256 for something more profitable than Bitcoin then bitcoin will die quickly, it's a winner takes all game.
In a nutshell, there is a chance that a different form of adaptive money might outperform Bitcoin and hi-jack its network.

This happens all the time.  PPC is often more profitable to mine than BTC, for example.  Miners who bother will shift to PPC, mine the PPC, then promptly dump it into the market to increase their BTC supply.  Eventually PPC sinks and they switch back to mining BTC.  Lately this doesn't happen often because (1) BTC+NMC mining is rarely worth less than PPC mining, and more and more people mine the combination, and (2) it's such a small gain, that even a tiny friction will make it a net loss, and who can be bothered?

The net effect of competing currencies has always been to increase the value of bitcoin.  If you want to buy DOGE, the easiest way is to buy some BTC, then exchange.  When you mine DOGE, you're probably going to dump it in order to buy BTC.  The same thing would happen with govcoin or corpcoin if it could be PoW mined.  AUR is the most akin to a govcoin of all the alts so far.  It's basically an ethnocoin.   Let's see how that plays out.  My bet is that it will get dumped for BTC just like every coin before it.

[Brangdon]

4) premined pos which saves energy

I don't understand that point. How does pre-mining save energy? What is "pos"?

I think the biggest single improvement to the Bitcoin protocol is changing the hashing algorithm to reduce the disadvantage of general purpose CPUs, so as to maximise the number of miners. Eg Litecoin.

Other than that, a coin would need a big backer. If a consortium of Amazon, Google and Microsoft all started promoting and accepting Litecoin, then I suspect focus would switch away from Bitcoin quite likely. I mention those companies because they all have server farms which they could potentially use for mining. And they are farms of of general purpose GPUs, not ASICs. They would be better at mining Litecoin than Bitcoin.

Perhaps another change would be to an inflationary policy. A lot of economists think a steady inflation rate of 1% or 2% is good for the economy, to stop people hoarding coins and to encourage investment. Without getting into the argument of whether they are right to think that, a new coin with such a policy hardwired might attract a lot of support in some circles.

Aside from that, and possibly even including that, I think Bitcoin is already so good that the "better" coins aren't sufficiently better to switch. Bitcoin has too much momentum. There's lots of venture capital going into Bitcoin. Litecoin already has several technical improvements, and it doesn't seem to be enough.

If miners can be encouraged to run SHA256 for something more profitable than Bitcoin then bitcoin will die quickly, it's a winner takes all game.

I don't follow. If some miners switch to a new coin, then the Bitcoin difficulty will drop and the remaining miners will make more coin. As long as the value of bitcoin doesn't crash, it will reach a new stable point with a lower number of miners. How is it "winner takes all"?

I dunno, ohhh.. lets say a government backed and regulated coin.

Which government? Do you think Europeans would be happy for their money to be regulated by America, or vice versa? Suppose Russia was the regulating government, and as part of their political argument about Ukraine they decided to black-list the coins of everyone who disageed with them? I'm British - would you trust the British government, given that in the past they used anti-terrorism laws to freeze Icelandic assets? (Hint: Iceland was not a terrorist country at the time.)

"Regulated" is a myth. It implies a central regulator, and that doesn't fit with a world currency - an internet currency.

[bitvestor]

Well, many replies is wrong, to beat bitcoin you will not only have to create an advanced bitcoin, think about it and read between the lines...

[Meuh6879]

1) faster transactions : why ? the network run at 7 transactions per second ? NO : i see in my log 0,3 transactions per second.
2) Lower transaction cost : why ? miners exist because of fee ... and fee restrict the SPAM of the network with 0 btc sending.
3) anonymity : why ? All bank can see the fund transmitter ... THE BANK, no me (it's not fair !)
4) premined pos which saves energy : why ? I want use my phone to pay in store (or internet sales)

[lorix]

Ok we all love bitcoin  , but there are hundreds of newcoins and not all of them are crapcoins. Bitcoin is the innovator and trailblazer but they are usually not the ones to succeed in the long term. What features that are improved over bitcoin will allow a new coin to ultimately dethrone the king.

1) faster transactions
2) Lower transaction cost
3) anonymity
4) premined pos which saves energy
5) you get the idea
 

None of the above, strictly speaking.

The ultimate determinate will be net-work effect - that is the number of people adopting the technology having a snowball effect that brings even more into the fold.

Now exactly how this might be achieved... it's not likely that an open source alt-coin would spring up and overtake Bitcoin as any game-changing features could ultimately be co-opted by the developers into Bitcoin.

The only real threat I see is if the major banks and credit card companies somehow got together and created a closed-source cryptocurrency that had the same look and feel to the end-user that Bitcoin has. They could then put their global marketing machine behind it and if they did I believe that could represent a solid threat to Bitcoin's dominance.

They could also employ other dirty tricks such as making the use of their credit card processing services to a business conditional on their NOT accepting Bitcoin as a payment method.

[Beliathon]

If miners can be encouraged to run SHA256 for something more profitable than Bitcoin then bitcoin will die quickly, it's a winner takes all game.

I dunno, ohhh.. lets say a government backed and regulated coin.

Nation-state governments and their rigged, ponzi-scheme currencies are going to magically regain legitimacy, eh?

Do you actually believe this shit, or are you just trolling? Nation-states and their clownish currencies are done, son.

Welcome to the information age, truth flourishes here.

[master-P]

A new coin would need infrastructure and adoption in order to overtake Bitcoin. Bitcoin has set the standard for cryptos, much like Apple or Paypal/Ebay have in their respective fields.

[ashapasa]

4) premined pos which saves energy

I don't understand that point. How does pre-mining save energy? What is "pos"?

I think the biggest single improvement to the Bitcoin protocol is changing the hashing algorithm to reduce the disadvantage of general purpose CPUs, so as to maximise the number of miners. Eg Litecoin.

Other than that, a coin would need a big backer. If a consortium of Amazon, Google and Microsoft all started promoting and accepting Litecoin, then I suspect focus would switch away from Bitcoin quite likely. I mention those companies because they all have server farms which they could potentially use for mining. And they are farms of of general purpose GPUs, not ASICs. They would be better at mining Litecoin than Bitcoin.

Perhaps another change would be to an inflationary policy. A lot of economists think a steady inflation rate of 1% or 2% is good for the economy, to stop people hoarding coins and to encourage investment. Without getting into the argument of whether they are right to think that, a new coin with such a policy hardwired might attract a lot of support in some circles.

Aside from that, and possibly even including that, I think Bitcoin is already so good that the "better" coins aren't sufficiently better to switch. Bitcoin has too much momentum. There's lots of venture capital going into Bitcoin. Litecoin already has several technical improvements, and it doesn't seem to be enough.

If miners can be encouraged to run SHA256 for something more profitable than Bitcoin then bitcoin will die quickly, it's a winner takes all game.

I don't follow. If some miners switch to a new coin, then the Bitcoin difficulty will drop and the remaining miners will make more coin. As long as the value of bitcoin doesn't crash, it will reach a new stable point with a lower number of miners. How is it "winner takes all"?

I dunno, ohhh.. lets say a government backed and regulated coin.

Which government? Do you think Europeans would be happy for their money to be regulated by America, or vice versa? Suppose Russia was the regulating government, and as part of their political argument about Ukraine they decided to black-list the coins of everyone who disageed with them? I'm British - would you trust the British government, given that in the past they used anti-terrorism laws to freeze Icelandic assets? (Hint: Iceland was not a terrorist country at the time.)

"Regulated" is a myth. It implies a central regulator, and that doesn't fit with a world currency - an internet currency.

very interesting points, thanks for sharing your thoughts. "POS" = coins like NXT, NEM etc there is no mining involved, coins are 100% premined and distributed before launch.

[jabo38]

Bitcoin essentially has a 0% market share in the world.  10 billion market cap, so what!  That is just a small part of a large company.  There is a lot of time and room for another coin to surpass bitcoin.  Said coin would only need a 0.5% market share and would be way larger than bitcoin.  What would do it?  A revolutionary new coin, based off of a different system that is safer, faster, more efficient, advertised better, easier to use, has lots of killer apps built on top of it, and has a much better marketing campaign.  Any new coin that does this, will tear bitcoin to pieces.  This isn't going to be a "hey, I forked bitcoin and added a single feature," type of coin.  It is going to take real innovation.  Same decentralized blockchain concept, but from the ground up, everything is different, better, faster, more efficient.  

[ashapasa]

Bitcoin essentially has a 0% market share in the world.  10 billion market cap, so what!  That is just a small part of a large company.  There is a lot of time and room for another coin to surpass bitcoin.  Said coin would only need a 0.5% market share and would be way larger than bitcoin.  What would do it?  A revolutionary new coin, based off of a different system that is safer, faster, more efficient, advertised better, easier to use, has lots of killer apps built on top of it, and has a much better marketing campaign.  Any new coin that does this, will tear bitcoin to pieces.  This isn't going to be a "hey, I forked bitcoin and added a single feature," type of coin.  It is going to take real innovation.  Same decentralized blockchain concept, but from the ground up, everything is different, better, faster, more efficient.  

You do have a point, 10 billion market cap is tiny in the grand scheme of things,  btw nice to see you outside the NEM thread   

[g4c]

If miners can be encouraged to run SHA256 for something more profitable than Bitcoin then bitcoin will die quickly, it's a winner takes all game.

I dunno, ohhh.. lets say a government backed and regulated coin.

Nation-state governments and their rigged, ponzi-scheme currencies are going to magically regain legitimacy, eh?

Do you actually believe this shit, or are you just trolling? Nation-states and their clownish currencies are done, son.

Welcome to the information age, truth flourishes here.

I admire your David and Goliath idealism, but see no rebuttal.