 You're watching the Daily Decrypt, you lucky duck. I am Amanda, your host, and today's episode is brought to you by Dash. There is no question that, within cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is king. No other cryptocurrency exceeds even 3% of Bitcoin's current market cap. But could it be dethroned? Certainly. The pace of technological progress makes disrupting established players faster, easier and cheaper than ever before. If Bitcoin is dethroned, it will likely be for one or more of the following five reasons. 1. If Bitcoin does not decap its block size, or at least dynamically scale it, to meet demand. Recently this video was released showing all of the upgrades made to the Bitcoin Core variant in 2015. Tellingly however, none of those commits included the one thing which pretty much everyone seems to want, which is an increase in Bitcoin's block size cap. For this reason, there are several competing variants out there, including Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited, and the much hyped but currently unavailable Bitcoin Classic. But for whatever reason, the people who truly control Bitcoin, that is its miners, have overwhelmingly remained with Core. Some have already speculated that the recent surge in various altcoin prices has been due to Bitcoin's current unlimited capability. If the available supply of Bitcoin's processing power remains lower than the demand for it, the current trickle to altcoins may turn into a flood. 2. If Bitcoin does not speed up its decision making process. Some say that governance within Bitcoin is not clear, but that's not really true. Its direction is determined by the majority of its miners, a democracy of hashing power, or a hashocracy if you will. And this hashocracy is currently proving to be one which takes a long time to make decisions. Just look at the block size debate for example, which has been raging for more than one year. Taking a long time to make decisions is neither inherently desirable nor undesirable, but markets generally reward the firms which adapt more quickly over the ones which adapt more slowly. 3. If Bitcoin does not make its addresses human readable at the protocol level. Bit shares was one of the coins that pioneered human readable payment addresses. For example, our bit shares address is yt-dailydcrypt rather than bts4569g87 or whatever other sort of address our username is obscuring away from us. There do exist fantastic apps like BitHala which make this sort of address naming possible for Bitcoin. But they remain third party centralized services, not being at the protocol level, and so are single points of failure. For a username system to really be robust it would have to be implemented in the code of Bitcoin itself. 4. If Bitcoin does not begin offering instant confirmations, or at least an increased trust level of zero confirmation transactions. Core Bitcoin developer Peter Todd recently carried out a successful double spend, meaning he sent coins to one address and then sent those very same coins to another. This showed that, at least if you're dealing with really highly skilled people, zero confirmation transactions in Bitcoin really can't be trusted. If more people, or machines, begin to develop the skills that Todd used to successfully do a double spend, anyone who doesn't want to wait around an extra 10 minutes after they buy or sell something, that is to say everyone, will switch to a cryptocurrency which offers instant confirmations, for example Dash. 5. If Bitcoin continues to not incentivize honest actors to run full nodes. It's been said that the health of a decentralized currency can be measured by, hey, how decentralized it is, meaning literally how many full nodes are there and how dispersed around the globe are they. Furthermore, it is an economic law that whatever you subsidize you'll get more of and whatever you tax you'll get less of. Bitcoin's node count has been steadily dropping for years because there is no subsidy to incentivize people to run them, rather there is a tax in terms of cost of hardware and bandwidth. Proof of stake coins like NXT for example don't have this problem as users are paid to mine coins by holding them and leaving their full node wallet open. Even the proof of work currency Dash doesn't have this problem, as it has its block reward between miners and masternodes. If Bitcoin's nodes are not systematically incentivized, their numbers are likely to continue to drop, especially as the blockchain becomes larger. Today's episode has been brought to you by Dash, whose node count today reached 98% of Bitcoin's. For those who like the security of hardware wallets, Dash can now also be used on Trezor hardware wallets using Electrum. Lead developer Evan Duffield will be talking more about what's coming up for Dash at the upcoming North American Bitcoin conference in Miami. And you can check it all out for yourself at Dash.org. We're independent members of the LTV network, we have a podcast there for you if you like and have a good day.