All Hail King Bitcoin: Why BTC Remains #1

[Abiky]

Why BTC remains number 1? Because bitcoin is the most popular coin in this industry. Many investors have already put their trust in bitcoin rather than on any other investment. Bitcoin helps the community and give an opportunity for individual who cannot find job nor make his own profits. Bitcoin is awesome, that is why it is coined the King.

Exactly. So far, there's no other cryptocurrency like Bitcoin in terms of development and innovation. The first-mover advantage has allowed Bitcoin to gain massive adoption within the mainstream world. Not to mention, it's the most secure and reliable cryptocurrency in existence. It's that reason why, Bitcoin has remained as the #1 cryptocurrency in market cap. The only way Bitcoin will fail, would be if another breakthrough technology emerges which overcomes all of its limitations.

With a limited supply, and a wide user base, it's been recognized as the reserve cryptocurrency of the market. Whenever Bitcoin rises in prices, most altcoins seem to follow its footsteps. If we were to choose a true contender of Bitcoin over the long term, that would be Ethereum. This is because, ETH has a long record of development and innovation over time just like Bitcoin. The development team and community has worked hard to make Ethereum a solid smart contracts platform for the world. That's the reason why ETH has remained second next to Bitcoin in terms of market cap.

Nonetheless, it seems very unlikely that Bitcoin's "throne" will be taken by another cryptocurrency anytime soon. The pioneer cryptocurrency is too big to fail with an ample amount of users, a massive hashrate, the most adoption from merchants worldwide, and so on. Which is why, I believe that Bitcoin will continue to be the "King of Crypto" for many years to come. Just my opinion

[tiedcoin]

Being a part of the volatile market that Bitcoin belongs to, people still seem to lay their trust in BTC and invest their money in it faithfully.
It is not surprising because of how dominant Bitcoin has been over the years. 2019 seems to be a special year for Bitcoin as well. Repeating the bullish trend of 2017, Bitcoin is expected to reach as high as $20,000 by the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020.
The ROI that Bitcoin has delivered to investors is also another driving factor responsible for its constant rise.

[sehoon]

If there is any altcoin that is going to surpass bitcoin, then they have to do more and that might even take years. Ethereum is the one who is the closest to it since it just got released last 2015 but already knows how to play around this market.

[nightxglow]

I think what affects the most is the fact that bitcoin is the first, which made it became well known by people than others cryptocurrency, and thus made it became number one. If we're talking about crypto, of course bitcoin is what it will come to our mind in the first place. Not others like ripple, eth, and such. Many people that took interest in bitcoin is what made bitcoin value is so high, and even after all these years many people only have interest in bitcoin, not other cryptocurrency. Including me, actually. As long as there's no other coin that can surpass bitcoin popularity, btc will remain number one.

[Herbert2020]

If there is any altcoin that is going to surpass bitcoin, then they have to do more and that might even take years. Ethereum is the one who is the closest to it since it just got released last 2015 but already knows how to play around this market.

price-wise it is simply impossible for an altcoin that has unlimited supply with currently huge circulating one to even come close to half a bitcoin price let alone surpass it in any ways. the only reason why ETH still doesn't have a value equal to Dogecoin is that it was released in 2015 and got its real hype in 2017 (recent history).

technology-wise a coin like ETH that has no real world application can never grow because its main purpose remains speculation inside exchanges and these coins don't have long term growth.

[adaseb]

If there is any altcoin that is going to surpass bitcoin, then they have to do more and that might even take years. Ethereum is the one who is the closest to it since it just got released last 2015 but already knows how to play around this market.

Ethereum actually almost over-took Bitcoin at one point in market cap. I remember that during the Segwit debate and all that UASF days people were starting to lose trust in BTC and started to buy ETH instead and if I recall the market cap came very close of each other, but it never actually exceeded BTC market cap.

Now its pretty far away from overtaking Bitcoin. Most due to all those ICOs which are probably still wanting to cash out and there are probably tons of people who bought ETH at like $1000 a coin who just want to break-even with their investment. Will be a while before the 2 ever become close in market cap again.

[bryant.coleman]

Ethereum actually almost over-took Bitcoin at one point in market cap. I remember that during the Segwit debate and all that UASF days people were starting to lose trust in BTC and started to buy ETH instead and if I recall the market cap came very close of each other, but it never actually exceeded BTC market cap.

Now its pretty far away from overtaking Bitcoin. Most due to all those ICOs which are probably still wanting to cash out and there are probably tons of people who bought ETH at like $1000 a coin who just want to break-even with their investment. Will be a while before the 2 ever become close in market cap again.

The closest that ETH got to BTC was on July 13th 2017. At that point, Bitcoin had a market share of 39.30% and Ether was close behind with 33.79%. The fightback looked remarkable back then, because just a few months back Ripple had pushed Ether to the no.3 position. Sometime during May 2017, Ether regained the no.2 spot, and during the next two months came so close to toppling BTC from the no.1 position.

But back then, everything was favoring Ether. The ICOs were at their peak, and Bitcoin was weakened considerably by the forking of Bitcoin Cash. Still from the charts, you can see a considerable 5.5% gap between BTC and ETH at the closest point. And during the next few years, its biggest strength (ICOs) would prove to be its biggest weakness as well.

[deisik]

If there is any altcoin that is going to surpass bitcoin, then they have to do more and that might even take years. Ethereum is the one who is the closest to it since it just got released last 2015 but already knows how to play around this market.

Ethereum actually almost over-took Bitcoin at one point in market cap. I remember that during the Segwit debate and all that UASF days people were starting to lose trust in BTC and started to buy ETH instead and if I recall the market cap came very close of each other, but it never actually exceeded BTC market cap

That's yet another nail into the market cap coffin

Yes, Ethereum might have come close to Bitcoin in terms of their market cap numbers, but how many coins of both camps have been actually traded and what percentage did that make of the total supply back then? It may turn out that we must divide the Ethereum market cap by a factor of ten to make a coherent and meaningful comparison between the two coins and their market share. To put it in more mundane terms, Ethereum was still far behind Bitcoin even when it was at its top in the summer of 2017

Now its pretty far away from overtaking Bitcoin. Most due to all those ICOs which are probably still wanting to cash out and there are probably tons of people who bought ETH at like $1000 a coin who just want to break-even with their investment. Will be a while before the 2 ever become close in market cap again

It was far from overtaking Bitcoin no matter when unless we take the market cap metric seriously

[Abiky]

The closest that ETH got to BTC was on July 13th 2017. At that point, Bitcoin had a market share of 39.30% and Ether was close behind with 33.79%. The fightback looked remarkable back then, because just a few months back Ripple had pushed Ether to the no.3 position. Sometime during May 2017, Ether regained the no.2 spot, and during the next two months came so close to toppling BTC from the no.1 position.

But back then, everything was favoring Ether. The ICOs were at their peak, and Bitcoin was weakened considerably by the forking of Bitcoin Cash. Still from the charts, you can see a considerable 5.5% gap between BTC and ETH at the closest point. And during the next few years, its biggest strength (ICOs) would prove to be its biggest weakness as well.

That's certainly true, mate. I believe that Ethereum's biggest strength was the ICO trend where it lead the cryptocurrency towards new ATHs in price. It was believed that it would surpass Bitcoin in market cap, because of its large prominence within the mainstream world. Right after the SEC started cracking down on ICOs, the hype was over, resulting in loss of interest among people within the mainstream world. Nowadays, Ethereum is far behind Bitcoin in market cap, making it relatively impossible to replace Bitcoin as the #1 cryptocurrency of the world.

It's no wonder why Bitcoin has retained its place in the market, as people trust it more than any other cryptocurrency on the market. Its top-notch development and innovation, has lead it towards new ATHs in mainstream adoption. Comparing it against other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin has real uses as a store of value that's built to last for a very long time. Ethereum and other alternative cryptocurrencies greatly lack mainstream adoption, despite being actively developed and maintained for quite some time. They're much more volatile than Bitcoin itself, and they lack a branding that's trusted by many people worldwide.

Nonetheless, Bitcoin's commitment towards censorship-resistance has attracted many people worldwide. It'll always be the #1 cryptocurrency in market cap, no matter what. The only way it could be replaced is if another cryptocurrency proves to overcome all of BTC's limitations gaining massive adoption within the mainstream world. Just my thoughts

[bitbunnny]

Bitcoin didn't become number one coin over night. It took many years to achieve the level of acceptance, a umber of users, trust and price value that has now.
There are too many coins at the market and many aim to take Bitcoin's place but that is not so easy. I don't see such potential in any other coin and success for any of them would certainly not come over night.

[Upgate]

The reasons why bitcoin still stays at the number place can't be explained in just a few words or page. But in summary bitcoin is doing everything better than the rest of the coin, it had a head start before any other coin,

[mika11]

Bitcoin is a king, like a country, the founder of that country is always considered the king and maybe if bitcoin is deposed, everything will turn to a new page!

[lixer]

Bitcoin is a king, like a country, the founder of that country is always considered the king and maybe if bitcoin is deposed, everything will turn to a new page!

If bitcoin is disposed and people allowed it, majority of us will go back to square one, square one in the sense that we will not be able to make that easy transactions again for our businesses, without involving people like swift, PayPal and most of these expensive money agents, secondly, our transactions will not be easy to make across the bother.

Ever since bitcoin has been in existence, it has been quite easy for people to make transactions across border without much barrier, and that was intention of bitcoin even though we have many people like drug dealers who are using it for illegal activities, but normally, it is meant to make things a bit easier for business people for them to be able to make payment to other of their suppliers easily.

[Oceat]

The reasons why bitcoin still stays at the number place can't be explained in just a few words or page. But in summary bitcoin is doing everything better than the rest of the coin, it had a head start before any other coin,

No one could ever explain it anyway if they have to and all we have to do is to follow it since Bitcoin is already here and it is the father of all cryptocurrency. A lot of altcoins were trying to copy it but they failed that's why we should believe how strong this cryptocurrency because we have a lot of people adopting it. No wonder why Satoshi is nowhere to be found since Bitcoin is uncontrollable.

[dnprock]

In terms of technology, Bitcoin is an over-engineered product selling at premium. It hides weakness in sophistication. People fiercely debated block size increase from 1 MB to 8 MB vs. 2-4 MB and SegWit/off-chain. The difference to user is very little. It's proven to be be true. BCH transaction number is low. BTC SegWit adoption is slow and low. Lightning Network seems dead. Bitcoin is able acquire some kind of intelligence, self-consciousness. It could be a form of self-conscious AI. It is able to live on its own. It feeds on its believer. It anoints new leaders to be its slaves. Despite these or maybe because of these, Bitcoin is a decent financial bet.

I see Bitcoin leaders constantly pronounce their belief and optimism on Twitter. It's so tiring to be like Bitcoin. I run an altcoin, https://bitflate.org. I think my altcoin has some interesting differentiation and adds value to crypto space. The technology is permissionless and open source. I can do what I want with it. I don't argue with people on the internet. I have a life to live. Bitcoin is the king because we are either too lazy or too afraid to do something.

[Shutup]

Originally published on coinclarity.com (this is my own article, but its more of an opinion piece than a news item, so I posted it here -- I'd like any input you may have to give on it).

Bitcoin has tripled in price since the beginning of the year – a move that not a whole lot of people saw coming – yet this time around altcoins have failed to follow in its footsteps… Why? In this article, we take a deeper look into what might be going on in the minds of investors that is preventing the expected “altcoin season” to manifest itself in the wake of bitcoin’s recent rise.


Hail King Bitcoin: Why BTC Remains #1 After All This Time
 
Normally speaking, within the context of the last 5 years or so, bullish momentum for BTC has usually translated into bullish momentum for altcoins. However, 2019 thus far has proven to be a rather lackluster year for most altcoins, as the total market cap of all altcoins has only doubled in comparison to bitcoin’s tripling. This has had the byproduct of helping BTC’s dominance of the total market cap percentage actually increase instead of decrease; the opposite of what happened in 2017.

Indeed, a few altcoins have had rather extraordinary rises in 2019, some even surpassing that of BTC’s. In terms of return on investment (ROI), Litecoin (LTC) is up 233%, Holochain (HOT) is up 223%, and Binance Coin (BNB) is up a staggering 408%. However, the list of coins that managed to beat King Bitcoin is much smaller than the list of coins whose ROIs paled in comparison. Take for example this year to date chart comparing the top 10 coins by market cap (excluding Tether, for obvious reasons).



All but 2 coins have a lower ROI than bitcoin, and Ripple (XRP) has somehow managed to be negative for the year thus far. Other traditionally “top tier” coins that have significantly underperformed in 2019 include IOTA (MIOTA), losing 1.7%, and Stellar (XLM), down a whopping 18%. No matter how you dice it, altcoins as a whole have not lived up to investor expectations in light of bitcoin’s magnificent rise.

Looking back at the great bull run of late 2017, the crypto market saw a declining dominance of bitcoin in the total market capitalization of all coins. This was due to the fact that even though bitcoin was rising to stratospheric new heights, the altcoin market as a whole was rising even faster. Coins like Ethereum (ETH), Dash (DASH) and NEM (XEM) – among countless others – were experiencing drastic gains in magnitude that BTC had not seen since 2011. Thus, even though the total market cap of all coins was rising, bitcoin’s relative share of this metric was on the decline. This can be visualized in the chart below, which shows BTC’s percentage of the total market cap (top line) sinking throughout the year as compared to other coins.



In 2019, however, a different picture has emerged: BTC is up, but altcoins as a whole are not up very much at all. This has led to an increasing dominance in the total market cap by bitcoin, rising from 52% on January 1st to 65% today. Likewise, the percentage of the total market cap held by other coins has been on the decline, meaning most of the new money flowing into crypto has been aimed at bitcoin.



So what gives? Why hasn’t there been a terrific “alt season” yet for altcoins in 2019? Well, a number of theories abound. The one most popular with altcoin holders – particularly those who recently plunged their money into alts thinking that they would be due for a 2017-like boost thanks to a rising bitcoin – is  that there is a lag currently occurring and that a renewed interest in the altcoin markets is just around the corner. Another theory, though not nearly as popular, is that altcoins were simply far too overvalued the last time around. In 2017, there seemed to have been a lot more optimism about what the future of cryptocurrency held. The idea was catching on that the general public may one day soon be ready to adopt not only bitcoin but a whole host of other coins as well, each one being able to fill a particular niche in the online economy.

After years of being overwhelmed by skeptics and a larger feeling of irrelevancy, the attitude of crypto enthusiasts in 2017 – encouraged by a largely prosperous 2016 – was that a blockchain solution could be applied to almost any problem, and that everything could be tokenized. In the fourth quarter of 2017, it truly looked like the sky was the limit for cryptocurrency. Globally-speaking, investors poured billions into highly-questionable projects, hoping to get in on “the next bitcoin.” Pretty much every cryptocurrency with the word “coin” in its name saw a rise, from Potcoin (POT), to Sexcoin (SXC), to PutinCoin (PUT).

The most notorious of coins to benefit from bitcoin’s rising tide was undoubtedly Bitconnect (BCC), which even managed to crack CoinMarketCap’s coveted top 10 for a couple of months. Though 2018 saw a surge of ICO projects that made 2017 look tame by comparison, a damper was put on the mood of crypto investors when a study revealed that up to 80% of the ICOs conducted in 2017 had proven themselves to be scams. Indeed, the market had grown too rapidly, and it was beginning to be impossible to sort out legitimate projects from the illegitimate. Dozens (if not hundreds) of Ethereum tokens that started out with good intentions are now all being thrown into the same branding as scam projects, perhaps even along with Ethereum itself.

To make matters worse, the rate of crypto adoption hasn’t been happening nearly as quickly as the markets are reflecting, which means that an even larger percentage of the total market cap is speculation-based than before. The third and fourth quarters of 2018 saw some major corrections occurring, with several coins having 50-80% of their market cap wiped out. Many of these coins will likely never recover, as perhaps they had simply been over-valued for far too long. Popular crypto Twitter personality Peter McCormack perhaps put it best in a recent tweet:

@PeterMcCormack
 The reason you haven’t had an alt season is simple. You all know that alts are junk and aren’t worth shit.

You’re hoping for more clueless morons to pump this shit but they aren’t here. 2017 was a one off, we were all clueless.

Buy Bitcoin, go long, STFU!

After all these years, BTC is still number one; more firmly now than it has been since April 2017. This fact stands even in the wake of potential “Bitcoin Killers” whose popularities have most likely already waxed and waned (the likes of which include ETH, BCH, and most recently, BSV). Bitcoin remains the increasingly-dominant cryptocurrency for some good reasons:

• It is the oldest, most dominant, most respected of its class, having achieved by far the greatest penetration of real world use case scenarios.
• It has some of the most innovative, experienced and well-funded minds working to make it better, allowing for its evolution in the face of stiff competition (Blockstream, Bitcoin Core, Lightning Network developers).
• It is the most trusted and secured of all blockchains, with over a million individuals likely to be mining on its network at any given time.

Of course, anything could happen in the future, and it’s surely possible that one day King Bitcoin will be overthrown by a worthy competitor that is perhaps better suited to meet the public demand for a permissionless, decentralized digital currency. However, for the time being, BTC reigns supreme in not only market cap, but in having the elements required to attract a wide stream global audience — a potential crowd of users that as of yet has been barely tapped into, even after 10 years in the making.

(for full links and image credits please visit the original source on coinclarity.com)

Btc remains because l believe this will be our currency to the whole world because it has the highest value of all tokens. This is what people attracts more especially investors and traders anf supporters. That's why its getting popular to all over the world. Bitcoin will be the best tool to help wash out povert all over the world.

[jake zyrus]

Compare to all cryptocurrency, bitcoin is surely number one. Nothing to argue about that. Bitcoin been through a lot for all those years and it just shows that bitcoin survived everything it went through. I agree that it's because bitcoin has already gain the trust of most users and that it's hard to break. Until now, no altcoin can beat bitcoin. We never know in the future but I still believe that bitcoin is capable for surviving more years and can even offer more when people started to adopt bitcoin.

[Tonteus]

Bitcoin is likely to be the king of the crypto market for a long time, unless of course it is moved by some new currency from a well-known and powerful company, which is also unlikely

[Abiky]

Bitcoin didn't become number one coin over night. It took many years to achieve the level of acceptance, a umber of users, trust and price value that has now.
There are too many coins at the market and many aim to take Bitcoin's place but that is not so easy. I don't see such potential in any other coin and success for any of them would certainly not come over night.

Exactly. In its very beginnings, Bitcoin wasn't even traded on the crypto market. There were no exchanges, making it difficult to acquire by people in the mainstream world. Because of this, not many people were aware of crypto. Trades were only performed in a P2P fashion via this very forum, or in person. Once Bitcoin became traded on the market it gained traction quickly, because it was the only cryptocurrency available. A few years later, altcoins started to emerge. Namecoin was the first altcoin in existence changing the world of crypto in its entirety.

Given the number of years that has passed, Bitcoin has gained trust and a good reputation within the mainstream world. It's been proven to be the most secure blockchain to date, despite being very energy consuming. Bitcoin took a lot of time and effort to become the cryptocurrency it is today. No matter if other altcoins are superior than it in terms of scalability and features, they cannot obtain the same level of trust that Bitcoin has. People prefer to deal with Bitcoin than any other altcoin for a very good reason. With widespread acceptance of businesses and merchants worldwide, it has become evident that Bitcoin is the "King of Crypto". Even altcoins depend on it as a reserve currency within the market.

Nonetheless, it's true that altcoins may need a lot of effort in order to take Bitcoin's place as the #1 cryptocurrency of the world. The altcoin which seems to be very close of "flipping" Bitcoin is Ethereum. After all, it's been the most actively developed and maintained altcoin in existence. Compared with Bitcoin, it has a large number of supporters behind it with many use cases for the mainstream world. Hence, if ETH continues to grow there could exist a possibility that it could take Bitcoin's place within the future. Just my thoughts