Yes, it's a highly volatile and ever-changing market. Hard forks serve notice that new algorithms are attractive to stagnating coins:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549572.0It's scenarios like this that pique my interest. At any moment the devs have the power to significantly alter the crypto world just as they did when they introduced scrypt. Just think of all the GPU farms and all the associated revenues. This is why I keep my GPUs: they are flexible and it's likely that they can endure and be usable in the future as new algos continue to be developed. Oh... and I'm still waiting for ROI on a few of them hehehehe
Backup QB is a good analogy. For GPU miners, LTC is the backup QB that saved the game and now other algos are stepping up in a similar role.
But... #2 (scrypt) seems to be easier to supplant than #1 (btc). So for now I'd say it's a battle for second place in the crypto world. Which is really annoying at the moment: switch to x13, back to x11, maybe I should do scypt-N? smh...!! blah!
I look forward to btc being the unobtanium of crypto and then maybe some other algo can replace it simply because of adequate supply/demand to be viable. If I were to draw a picture I'd make BTC a boa constrictor squeezing on miners. The more we try to mine btc, the harder it becomes and the inevitable outcome is that btc will remain while other coins occasionally swell.
It will make a good story.
