👊🏽 [Analysis] How could an altcoin win? – MetaStable (July 2014)

In 2014, Bitcoin ($BTC) had high market dominance and as a result, numerous potential models of altcoins that could potentially reduce BTC dominance emerged. The models include:

• Better anonymity. As BTC is pseudonymous, it faces the risk of identities being uncovered if anyone could map some portion of addresses to identities. There is a huge demand for an anonymous payment store of value for many reasons.
• Centralized mining proof. Bitcoin faced serious mining centralization problems in 2014 with ghash.io briefly exceeding 50%. Thus, a centralization proof consensus algorithm is greatly desired.
• More expressive protocols. Bitcoin faces limitations in terms of Turing completeness and expressiveness so a protocol that can enable more complex behaviors has high potential.
• Brokering scarce resources. In addition to money, other scarce resources can also derive high value for a cryptocurrency.
• Faster/easier innovation. Bitcoin has the potential to become too conservative to improve, thus faster, more agile protocols can potentially overtake Bitcoin.