There are die-hard advocates of bitcoin, alt coins, colored coins, sidechains and alternative blockchain applications. This article does a great job of finding analogies from the past to illustrate one viewpoint of how the bitcoin ecosystem will grow.
Dialpad, the initial king of voice-over-IP, didn’t scale, was acquired by Yahoo!, withered into irrelevance, and is now an obscure historical footnote. It wasn’t until Skype came along that large numbers of non-techies really began to care. Similarly, veteran founder John Pettitt analogized Bitcoin today (or at least Bitcoin applications/clients today) to the gopher protocol in the early days of the Internet, adopted by techies but ignored by the general public…and suggested we haven’t yet seen the cryptocurrency Mosaic, much less a Netscape. If either analogy is remotely correct, then the battle brewing today is likely to cast an awfully long and important shadow.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/06/a-bitcoin-battle-is-brewing/?ncid=tcdaily