I guess I put the possibility at zero that the right arrangement or rollout happens for any project/coin/platform/protocol/consensus. So the ideas will need to evolve. Without running the experiments and seeing which ones work as they scale, we will be stuck in endless debate. Technology doesn't wait for endless debate -- it moves on without us.
I agree that the best technology may not win out, but I think that will have to do with how a given platform combines a series of variables and ultimately how they help people get from A to B (transferring money, data, identify, etc...). In the end, there will not be a single winner, but a series of winners who best address their respective problems. And the variables at play include the tech, transaction fees, open vs closed source, game theory, economic incentives for all participants, and many more... The bigger a platform gets, the more people/businesses have serious money tied up in it, the more likely a community is to fracture over how these variables combine.
No one knows how their platform will work in the wild any more than a poet knows how readers will interpret the poem.
Dan Larimer found easier to move onto new projects to refine his ideas than change the existing projects -- and so he forked himself from BitShares to Steem to EOS.
So you're right ... we need to keep an eye out for the next thing. And you're also right -- the next thing might already be here now.
Exciting times, huh?
If history is any judge, typically only a handful survive. Internets of 1999 now boiled down to VERY few long term winners: Netflix, Amazon, Expedia, and maybe ebay yahoo and aol depending on how you view long term success. same should be true of crypto, only we'd argue there's less technology in crypto, so possibly even less than a handful of winners.
Last comment ... need to see how far we can push the boundaries on the right side of this page ... 👉👉👉
I wonder if it will be difficult to tell how many companies emerge as successful. Could a bunch of decentralized platforms emerge that allow for a wide spectrum of companies successfully innovating on top. There will certainly be some huge winners, but there may be a long tail of smaller businesses making a run of it, too. That's my hope, anyway.