"Until central banks were invented in the 17th century, the money supply was unregulated even if governments did stamp coins. Other unregulated or private curre

"Until central banks were invented in the 17th century, the money supply was unregulated even if governments did stamp coins. Other unregulated or private currencies have emerged from time to time—think of cigarettes in prison camps. " They didn't have the same conditions as we have with highly networked computers, so this is not a fair comparison and thus can't be solely relied upon to produce accurate statements about the eventual long-term result of the usage of the currency. "True, bitcoins cannot be manufactured beyond the limits set by Nakamoto. But there is no way to prevent future Nakamotos from creating bitcoin substitutes—say, bytecoin, or botcoin. If merchants are willing to accept bitcoins, they will be willing to accept the substitutes, especially as bitcoins become scarce and consumers scramble for substitutes." Is this reasoning not flawed? Bitcoin has built a certain level of brand equity and track record, in addition to the fact that its difficulty to produce via mining damps the rate of its injection into the market. By the time any alernative virtual currency has caught up, it will have its own reason to exist – either by virtue of how it's mined or because some entity is backing it financially. The question of whether computational mining has a problem is not being pointed out concretely so there's no proof to verify that there's a more favorable virtual currency. So, if the other virtual currency is of equivalent quality and Bitcoin's integrity and existence (stability) remain then would not the users of the currency just as easily jump TO bitcoin than from it?