most altcoins will fail, but to still view it as narrow as that article and you view it is completely wrong.
There WILL be digital competitors out there. I think the problem that people are making is the fact that they have to see an altcoin rise to the value of something like bitcoin to be deemed "successful" and that is completely the wrong way to look at it. People tend to go against what is deemed as a monopoly and most altcoins today provide a different "gimmick" if you will against bitcoin. There is too much money involved for ALL altcoins to go away completely.
Hell, given the Aurora situation right now...it actually has a chance of a wide adoption within a single country before Bitcoin ever has that chance and spread out (given if its not some grand scheme). To still view everything in a vacuum that is bitcoin is short-sighted and downright ignorant given the fact that there are already 200+ competitors out there. Litecoin is a respectable #2 although I don't think it will hold that crown for long...something else will rise.
either
a) you didn't read the post
b) you fail to come up with any valid argument
there are many fallacies in what you posted.
An altcoin, like any cryptocurrency aims to become a legitimate and mainstream store of wealth and currency. How else do you want to deem an altcoin successful ? Don't tell me it is because people are mining it and trading it for money. All this makes it is a speculative investement.
What is a cryptocurrency actually for? I say that its purpose is to become money. It is obvious that creating altcoins impedes that purpose. Altcoins can only be explained if we believe the purpose of cryptocurrencies is to make money rather than to become money. If you can trick people into investing in your new altcoin, then you can make a profit trading it or mining and selling it.
No, people do not go against what you call a "monopoly" when it comes to currency and store of wealth. Quite the contrary, they go with what the network has agreed is worth something.
Quite simply, a medium of exchange that is more widely accepted on the market is more useful than one which is not. This is known as the network effect. Thus, an initial imbalance between two nearly equal media of exchange will benefit whichever is more widely accepted until a single one overwhelms the rest. There is no limit to this effect: ultimately one would always expect a single currency to overcome all its competitors.
This is not a "short-sighted" and ignorant view. This is an economic reality.
It's funny you refer to altcoins as providing a different "gimmick" than Bitcoin because it is exactly what they are. A gimmick. Gimmicks that provide no substantial improvement against Bitcoin and are supported by a weaker network and infrastructure of exchanges etc.
Bitcoin has a market larger by a wide margin than all the markets of all the altcoins put together, and this makes it vastly more useful as a currency. To defeat Bitcoin, an altcoin would require not just superior technology, but such vastly superior technology as to be an advance over Bitcoin comparable to the advance Bitcoin represents over fiat currency.
This does not mean that there is anything intrinsically wrong with altcoins: the problem is simply that once Bitcoin exists, then there is no additional value, from a monetary standpoint, of creating knock-offs.
You cannot possibly be using Auroracoin to support your stance. This "gimmick" is destined to fail terribly considering there is no concrete plan for distribution and that probably only about 0,5 % of Iceland know about cryptocurrency ? When March 25th come the market will become so much diluted this coin is probably gonna be worth 1% of its current value.
Sure there is a 200+ competitors out there, but they bring no additional value. They're simply copycats trying to ride the Bitcoin hype.
In short, your argument that there SHOULD and WILL be competition is short sighted and ignorant in itself
In the case of a currency, it is inherently most useful when it dominates its competition. The less competition a currency has, the more useful it is. If you try to compete with the best currency with another one that’s exactly the same, that makes yours the worse currency, so you really should not have bothered.