If usdcoin (the digital construct) is successful at the expense of bitcoin, why would bitcoin be used at all?
My "bitcoin value collapses" scenario list includes the cryptocurrency space being won by an altcoin. I should probably give some more analysis to the specific altcoin of "something pegged to fiat, with government backing".
But if that coin succeeds, won't it be the fee currency? Why would btc coexist in a meaningful but not dominant position?
(I can see BTC coexisting with USD and EUR if you can't pay taxes in BTC, but if BTC succeeds in that scenario, I think there's still lots of headroom for the price.)
Lack of counter-party risk. There are a variety of mostly technical reasons why it is desireable that fees be paid in a peer-to-peer issued currency vs a central-party issued currency. For example, if there are multiple competing currencies in use (e.g. usdcoin and eurocoin, or more likely bitstampusd vs bitreserveusd), then a p2p currency like bitcoin provides a neutral platform for setting fee policy.
In early 2000, I registered my personal domain name weidai.com, along with a couple others, because I was worried that the small (sole-proprietor) ISP I was using would go out of business one day and break all the links on the web to the articles and software that I had published on my "home page" under its domain. Several years ago I started getting offers, asking me to sell the domain, and now they're coming in almost every day. A couple of days ago I saw the first six figure offer ($100,000).
In early 2009, someone named Satoshi Nakamoto emailed me personally with an announcement that he had published version 0.1 of Bitcoin. I didn't pay much attention at the time (I was more interested in Less Wrong than Cypherpunks at that point), but then in early 2011 I saw a LW article about Bitcoin, which prompted me to start mining it. I wrote at the time, "thanks to the discussion you started, I bought a Radeon 5870 and started mining myself, since it looks likely that I can at least break even on the cost of the card." That approximately $200 investment (plus maybe another $100 in electricity) is also worth around six figures today.
Clearly, technological advances can sometimes create gold rush-like situations (i.e., first-come-first-serve opportunities to make truly extraordinary returns with minimal effort or qualifications). And it's possible to stumble into them without even trying. Which makes me think, maybe we should be trying? I mean, if only I had been looking for possible gold rushes, I could have registered a hundred domain names optimized for potential future value, rather than the few that I happened to personally need. Or I could have started mining Bitcoins a couple of years earlier and be a thousand times richer.
I wish I was already an experienced gold rush spotter, so I could explain how best to do it, but as indicated above, I participated in the ones that I did more or less by luck. Perhaps the first step is just to keep one's eyes open, and to keep in mind that tech-related gold rushes do happen from time to time and they are not impossibly difficult to find. What other ideas do people have? Are there other past examples of tech gold rushes besides the two that I mentioned? What might be some promising fields to look for them in the future?