But then if people panic and see how hard it is to get back into fiat from BTC won't they just go into relatively stable altcoins instead? For example DOGE is skyrocketing as we speak and it's USD price was totally unaffected by BTC's recent plummet. http://coinmarketcap.com/
EDIT: "If" -> "Is".
What, you thought other coins had their own code? Nope, they are all just a copy/paste of Bitcoin's code.
Specifically Dogecoin was "coded" (copy/pasted) in a Friday night, according to it's founder. So I don't know what you were expecting.
It will be interesting to see how each developer set and community handle this problem (and the future problems).
Disclaimer: I don’t own BTC or DOGE (or LTC or any other virtual currency).
Typically a copycoin will only have the same fixes as Bitcoin depending on when they decided to copy it. But then they will invariably lag behind.
"The OpenUDC softwares are designed to manage a free money system as described by the TRM (Théorie Relative de la Monnaie), that means a money system where no human has privileges in front of money creation either in time or in space."
The concept is therefore quite different from BTC which clearly gives some people a huge privilege in front of money creation in time