There are numerous thread about the so called flippening. But what happened?
The floppening, that's what happened
The point is that real economic activity is difficult to measure or prove, and a metric for real economic activity is what really determines the top currency, period, cryptocurrency or fiat.
It's too easy to fabricate activity in any system, the financial press have been bleating about the Chinese economic miracle for more than 10 years, but there are equal numbers of stories about how fake all the growth figures are, or how severely leveraged all the growth is, or how the growth is all supply driven with no corresponding demand (ghost cities etc).
Cryptocurrencys proven to be little different, we've had 2 years of super high transaction volume in Bitcoin itself, and it's apparently all been driven by unknown actors pushing the "scaling" conflict (the tx rate numbers are far more pedestrian ever since the apparent cessation in hostilities in the Bitcoin development conflict).
So i don't what the best metric to measure cryptocurrency competition is, despite how veracious Satoshi's design is otherwise. Merchant acceptance? Easy to fake. Maybe transaction fees as a proportion of the monetary base? Not so easy (well, not so cheap) to fake, but the tx spammers have proven that some people have deep enough pockets to skew that metric. Maybe propensity to accept Bitcoin? Not so easy to measure.
When it comes down to it, false information is not a phenomenon that cryptographic proof systems can abolish, the goalposts simply move.
