2018 has been a big year for all the blockchain's popularity, and how far they have come .
I disagree, this year was mostly newcomers licking their wounds in the cryptocurrency market rather than adoption of the blockchain technology. it was mainly last year that the "boom" happened because of price rises the technology was also becoming popular.
BITCOIN:
Miners not only record the transactions but verify them too.
no, the miners only find blocks by performing certain "work". they don't know how to verify transactions. a full node does the verification for them. a miner can also run a node and do the verification but still the verification is done by the node not the miner.
In my personal view, Bitcoin is and will stay more relevant ,since it has first mover advantage.Also ,let me know what is the best forum to post such stuff.
it is not about the "first mover advantage" otherwise the previous projects that were made before bitcoin (before 2008) would have been bigger than bitcoin now instead of not existing at all!