Indeed, it seems really early to throw away blockchains because one change to the consensus rules for the Bitcoin blockchain ended up not being popular. There's

Indeed, it seems really early to throw away blockchains because one change to the consensus rules for the Bitcoin blockchain ended up not being popular. There's still tons of other unexplored space on the Bitcoin chain itself, not even counting altcoins - there's a lot of flexibility with Bitcoin script, and new opcodes are being added (OP_CLTV got turned on very recently). Some of these allow you to develop altcoins that are backed by Bitcoin, called sidechains (see Elements Alpha for an example [1]). There's other clever ways to use the scripting system to do fancy things that could help lower the cost of transactions, like the Lightning network [2]. [1] https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements [2] http://lightning.network/ http://lightning.network/