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Comment by AlexanderDhoore | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, maybe not. I'd like to compare it to social media. Facebook has a massive user base and is very hard to defeat, because there's no way in for competitors. But Bitcoin has no central servers, no one company calling the shots. Someone, somewhere could decide to exchange Bitcoins for Xcoins. Then Xcoins could exist next to Bitcoin, no problemo.

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I agree, they could exist. But why would anyone want Xcoins, Ycoins or Zcoins instead of Bitcoins? It's not a choice between meaningless desktop wallpapers or your favourite cheeses - this is a currency. And for that you need faith that other people will accept it.

Why would people want Bitcoins in the first place? Whatever the source of demand for Bitcoin was in 2009 (when it was monopoly money) should be equally applicable to competing systems today.

People started playing around with Bitcoin because it was something new and exciting, it was truly the first of it's kind! Ideas were being thrown around, more and more people started joining the ecosystem, mining was getting really competitive, Bitcoins found their place on Silk Road, etc.

The point I'm trying to make is that Bitcoin was first! And all that excitement and experimentation over time translated into monetary investments and architecture, something the alt coins will have to work really hard to obtain! Not saying it's impossible, just highly unlikely.

You have not actually answered the question. Experimentation and competitive mining do not translate to demand. Why did people ever start exchanging valuable things for Bitcoin?

I did answer your question, read it again. Do you think that the guy who sold a pizza for 10'000 put some sort of actual value on Bitcoins? No, it was all good fun. You can also include in the mix the idea that this technology seemed like it might go somewhere at the time (still does!) so it might not have been the value at the time that people were putting on Bitcoins, but the value in the future. It's not that easy answering those kind of questions to be honest, without polling everyone who was involved in the community from the beginning and asking them what was their reasoning. So I can only speak for myself.

Not necessarily true. Just look at gold - you can say the same thing about competing metals, but gold was the original and is seen by people as the true de facto metal currency. This has been the case for hundreds of years.

Except that gold was not the first metal to be used as currency.

Alt exchanges exist already. Again - why should merchants bother setting up a new payment system if anyone can exchange altcoins for bitcoin easily?

because of all of Bitcoin's black market/early-adopter emotional baggage (the BOA report addresses this as Seigniorage). I'm not saying Litecoin is any better but my best guess is that eventually a solution will emerge with a model that negates the need to mine in order to maintain the integrity of the blockchain. (Maybe something that incorporates such costs into the exchanges, which then form a network that does this processing? Not actually saying that would work, just an example).

Basically a system that is "more professional" will come out, think of it as Bitcoin 2.0. All the vendors will adopt since they can co-opt a lot of the same POS systems they're already using (how hard would it be, really, to accept 2 forms of cryptocurrency instead of 1?)

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