The old objections against altcoins are rolled out and paraded again like a good circus.<p>Let me paraphrase what author is saying: "There will be no other cryptocurrency, for whatever purpose, ever, than bitcoin."<p>That's of course complete bunk. Yes, most of the existing altcoins are doomed, because they don't add anything of value. The few that do add something unique, are as likely as not to see these features adopted into bitcoin itself.<p>However there are areas where an altcoin can succeed, under the following conditions:<p>- If it adds something unique<p>- If what it adds is useful and liked by people<p>- If what it adds cannot be incorporated into bitcoin<p>Wait, how can it be that something can't be incorporated into bitcoin? Well, bitcoin has a certain architecture, which makes some ideas more easy to incorporate, and others hard, or impossible. A few examples of things that would have a difficult time landing in bitcoin:<p>- Colored coins<p>- Blockchain based trade order execution (would also be predicated on colored coins).<p>- Domain name resolution<p>- Trust metrics<p>- Arbitration and reversable transactions<p>There's many more. But you get the idea, most of these things are not inherently compatible with how bitcoin works, and is liked by people for working in this fashion. That doesn't make this bad ideas, it just makes them ideas where supplemental systems can excel.