This is just a thought. Dash presents itself as "advanced Bitcoin" and aims to surpass Bitcoin in becoming the mainstream digital currency. We all know that Dash has significant technological advantages over Bitcoin, while Bitcoin has the advantage of being the first, best known currency, and that it has the largest user base. From a technical view, there should be no problem in merging all the advancements in Dash back to Bitcoin code. This would IMO effectively make Dash obsolete, because it would no longer be superior to Bitcoin.
The question is, would the Bitcoin community recognize the benefits of such a merge and would the majority support it? It may seem unlikely now, but what if in a few years, Dash will become more popular and have (lets say) the second largest market cap and would be threatening Bitcoins first position. But maybe at this point, Dash will have the same popularity as Bitcoin and should the merge happen, the two currencies would be equal.
What are your thoughts on this?
Back in 2014 there was a vocal group of Bitcoin maximalists decrying altcoins as "scams." The argument was that altcoins would never have any value, since even if they did come up with something innovative, that innovation would just be copied by Bitcoin. If for some reason Bitcoin couldn't (or didn't want to) copy that altcoin's features, they could just create a "sidechain." Thus Bitcoin would always be king.
Fast forward three years, and the community can't even agree on how to increase the network's transaction capacity. They have no governance model, no method of enforcement, and no "sporks" that can reset the network to a previous condition if something goes wrong. Upgrading Bitcoin's code requires a 95% consensus amongst miners, and right now nobody has come anywhere close to achieving this. Even SegWit, which by itself should be fairly uncontroversial, is only at about 25% adoption because it's become mired in politics.
Bitcoin is totally paralyzed, and there's no sign this will change any time soon. Just think about it--they've been arguing about block size for more than three years now. Three years to decide whether to increase blocksize by a piddly 1 MB. It's absolutely extraordinary. The U.S. Congress looks downright productive when compared to Bitcoin.
tl;dr: Technically, Bitcoin could adopt many of our features either through sidechains (which haven't yet been invented) or through radically overhauling their own software (we are a two-tier network and they are not, so the changes required would be massive). But such a change will never happen, because Bitcoin is completely ossified.
P.S. I remember this same question was asked during early Ethereum development, except in that case it was "If Ethereum is to be open source, what keeps somebody from just forking it." The answer, of course, is nothing. But that market is usually pretty good at rewarding whatever version is seen to be authentic (usually the version that has the rock star development team). Look at Ethereum versus Ethereum Classic!
Even if Bitcoin did eventually decide to copy Dash, the market would likely recognize that Dash's team is the one that's innovating, and that Bitcoin's team is merely copying. Why use the copycat's software when you can use the innovator's version? Besides, Bitcoin would always be trying to catch up with our latest changes, since by definition, we would get them first!
