Andreas Antonopoulos makes an argument that if BTC gets more accepted, then the FUD that governments can bring down on exchanges can be a serious detriment to the currency. Then the more virulent strains of cryptocurrencies could sidestep what bitcoin cannot. Government speaks of it as an anonymous currency which it is not, but some of the alternaitves like Monero and Dash do have these characteristics. The exchanges have AML and KYC making it difficult to convert national fiat.
I suspect we'll have a better idea in November whether bitcoin can keep up. Right now it has the name and brand label. Other currencies haven't faced the scaling issue on the same level as bitcoin has.
Lightning network might make the difference though and save bitcoin from potential demise if it does so in time before the FUD wipes it out.
When I was referring to SOV, I was thinking in particular of Aristotle's principle of scarcity which is why Bitcoin fits the bill better than ETH in this regard. BTC has a fixed upper limit which means that it's deflationary over time. Bitcoin isn't unique in this regard though as there are many others that do the same. Ethereum however is not deflationary because it's meant as a transaction facilitator.
Thanks for taking time to respond. My problem with BTC is that EVERY SINGLE THING about it completely unnecessary. BTC has no Unique Selling Point. It has no clear roadmap, too much disharmony and censorship in the community AND many of the cryptos are limited in supply. Dash has only ~18 million coin supply.
None of the proposed solutions doesn't do anything on the protocol level and to make matters worse, Alt-coins have already solved/implemented EVERY SINGLE one of them and more.
NEM has been able to do 3000Tx/s for a long time. Dash&PIVX has 1.3 second transactions for just a few cents (or at times only a fraction of a penny.) Multiple coins already have/planned protocol level user names and messaging.
Dash has been getting 1-3 merchant adoption per day while the number is a negative value for BTC. Decentralized exchanges and p2p buying/selling of alt-coins is already picking up steam. BTC is simply already obsolete.
I have a few other alt currencies like ETH, LTC... Many of the alt coins are more difficult to gain access to and I haven't had time to read their white papers. EOS is another one that seems very promising.
I'm wondering though about some of these other alt coins how decentralized some of them are. It seems to be a trade off between being efficient and able to get something done and lagging behind the way bitcoin does because there's no central authority.
I just missed the dip in June when Vitalik Buterin's death rumor sent the coin down to 10 cents! You don't want to be in the situation where the death of one person can mean the end of the coin. But I hold onto ETH because of its smart contract platform.
Most of the BTC mining is done in China. Authorities could deal a major blow to BTC mining easily. https://steemit.com/eos/@iang/eos-with-dpos-is-immune-to-the-gfw-attack-because-it-is-more-decentralised
https://www.dashforcenews.com/bitcoin-disincentivizes-community-harmony/
One of the main reasons BTC can't really get anything done is exactly because it has no governance model. BTC is a tragedy of the commons.
Buying ETH with fiat is just as easy as BTC and several exchanges are already adding Dash/fiat trading pairs. The P2P buying opportunities are also improving. BTC on the other hand is going nowhere except down and Wall Street.