You'd have to convince the whole ecosystem - miners, exchanges, wallets, buyers, sellers, etc. - to switch over. It's the same network effect that protects Microsoft or Google or Facebook or even Nike: changing peoples' behavior is hard, and in general beyond the resources of new entrants unless the incumbent really screws up.
(Arguably, Bitcoin's rise is precisely because of the incumbent really screwing up. If someone created a new currency in the 1970s or 1990s - and people did - folks would laugh at them. It's only because trust in the government and mainstream financial system is so low - and the Fed continues to print trillions of dollars to paper that over - that Bitcoin has gained a foothold.)
"If we collectively wanted to..." is never an answer. People don't make collective decisions, they make individual ones. Adoption requires convincing lots of people, individually, that your new solution is better. You can get a boost from peer pressure, but you have to start the flywheel going yourself.
You don't need to convince miners at all. If BTCs future is in using it, it has to convince the future companies and stores to not use other coins or services. Or to a buyer today to still have as much demand even after the speculation is gone (which is currently its main/only function).
Wallets, miners, etc won't really matter at all if Square and Amazon etc have a plugin that uses a stable coin of each currency along with BTC. The world will have infinite transfer capabilities of other "scarce" non-fiat and fiat pegged coins without BTC (including other electronic currency based services).
> You'd have to convince the whole ecosystem - miners, exchanges, wallets, buyers, sellers, etc. - to switch over. It's the same network effect that protects Microsoft or Google or Facebook or even Nike: changing peoples' behavior is hard, and in general beyond the resources of new entrants unless the incumbent really screws up.
Quite a few projects have tried exactly this, and none of them have succeeded. What makes you think your attempt would succeed?
That's my point - the thing that makes bitcoin "scarce" is not that there is a fundamental limit to the number of bitcoin-like tokens that exist, it's just that there's inertia against creating more.
I don't mean "if we collectively wanted to" to suggest that people will just up and choose to do so tomorrow, only to say that it's that lack of collective will, rather than true scarcity, that restricts the number of bitcoins.
And not only that. Once the last block is mined, the only revenue for the miners will be transaction fees. If anyone insists on a large future valuation of BTC, it follows there will be massive future transaction fees. Massive transaction fees dissolve any advantages stemming from network effects.
(Arguably, Bitcoin's rise is precisely because of the incumbent really screwing up. If someone created a new currency in the 1970s or 1990s - and people did - folks would laugh at them. It's only because trust in the government and mainstream financial system is so low - and the Fed continues to print trillions of dollars to paper that over - that Bitcoin has gained a foothold.)
"If we collectively wanted to..." is never an answer. People don't make collective decisions, they make individual ones. Adoption requires convincing lots of people, individually, that your new solution is better. You can get a boost from peer pressure, but you have to start the flywheel going yourself.