A few years back, there was a thread titled
Why Bitcoin can never be beaten by any other cryptocurrencies? Does anyone know what happened to it?
Some of the posts included:
OP- It's always possible that another cryptocurrency could overtake bitcoin as #1, but there's only one altcoin that currently exists that could possibly do that and I really don't see it happening. Another cryptocurrency could be invented and possibly overtake bitcoin one day, but bitcoin is currently the most secure, most decentralized, most valuable, most adopted, and most fairly launched cryptocurrency that is currently in existence, and it also has the biggest infrastructure.
Satoshi created bitcoin to solve the problem of trust with governments and to be a store of value that can be sent/received anywhere/anytime without permission or trust of anyone else. Over 99% of altcoins were created to enrich their founders and over 99% of them have no future. None of them are as secure, as decentralized, or launched as fairly as bitcoin. Cryptocurrency is full of scammers/grifters, ignorance, and people that actually believe the lies because they've been sucked into shady cults. People use altcoins for trading/gambling to increase their bitcoin stack or even their ethereum stack if they don't understand bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Gambling on altcoins can be very profitable during a bull run, but you can also lose bitcoin.
Satoshi took careful steps to make sure that the world would look back and observe that bitcoin was launched fairly:
No premine (Satoshi didn’t grant himself any coins)
Gave a 2 month heads up before launching the network (no sudden release and no mining before release)
Coins had no value for 1.5 years so they circulated freely (this cannot even be replicated)
Satoshi never cashed out (unlike every other founder in history and I bet that it never happens again)
Satoshi created bitcoin for the world and he never even cashed out. He did it for us and he didn't even profit from it. It's truly amazing and it's 100% impossible to ever have a cryptocurrency where the coins are circulating in the wild freely for 18 months before having any value. I also don't think that we'll ever see another cryptocurrency created where the founder never cashes out. It's also decentralized with the nodes in full control and there's no central leader, which is probably why he left us because it was best for bitcoin's success. No premine, no developer fund, no developer tax, never sold, no profit, no fame for his real identity, and he gave a two-month heads up about before he launched bitcoin. Everyone altcoiner has Satoshi to thank for all of the cryptocurrencies that even exist. Satoshi paved the way and i's impossible for anyone to ever replicate the exact way that he launched bitcoin because the genie is out of the bottle and cryptocurrency now exists.
Your thoughts?
Bitcoin is a brand
Bitcoin is currently giving class to any other cryptocurrency. However, it's starting to slowly show its weaker points such as not being able to scale well enough to sustain the entire userbase and tx count.
It's probably only a matter of time before someone else comes out with an even better currency that beats Bitcoin to the ground. I expect that to happen someday since tech is only going to advance and so will humanity (hopefully). At the time of writing this post, I feel like most alts are battlegrounds for Bitcoin. Alts are coming out with various updates and features, Bitcoin gives them time and if everything works right and the said updates/features have the capacity of improving Bitcoin's decentralization, scalability etc then BTC might take the features as well through future updates.
Alts are unstable. Some of them are prone to various kind of attacks. Others have supposed privacy that can easily be broken within a reasonable time. The alt that will conquer BTC is the one that will come out as an even more decentralized one that will be also newbie-friendly and will have enough features and updates to be considered a proper enemy of BTC. If we take a look at the top 5 alts, we can already see that even the closest enemies of BTC cannot even compare to it. They're all having the issues BTC already has/had, they're mostly more centralized than Bitcoin is.. I'm also still waiting for a proper warrior to come out and battle BTC's abilities.
When bitcoin was invented by Mr. Nakamoto back in 2009, did he expect that bitcoin will see that much popularity that it is enjoying today. Did Mr. Laszlo think that his pizza purchase would someday be valued at few hundred millions? I guess no!
So I personally think we should not assume that bitcoin will forever remain as a king of the crypto world. It will definitely remain as a pioneer cryptocurrency of course.
It may happen that some other cryptocurrency will take over bitcoin in the long run. Sadly bitcoin is mostly being used as an investment rather than a currency and for a good reason! It is very much possible for people to adopt a faster and cheaper alternative to transact money! You never know!
Tech isn't the only facet, though. There's so much that can't be easily replicated. It's almost like finding life on other planets. The conditions have to be just right.
Even if someone did come up with a technology that proved to be faster and more secure without sacrificing decentralisation, it's likely they wouldn't be as altruistic as satoshi was. Transparent and fair distributions are an exceedingly rare thing. Will the developers lay the foundations out of sheer belief in the goals of the project without financial recompense? If not, how will they be paid? How do you prevent a big company or a rich individual from buying up the vast majority of the early coin emissions? The earlier point raised in the thread about Bitcoin having no value when it was first launched is an important consideration. Every "next big thing" is now hyped and marketed for rampant speculation. Crypto is big business now. There's no going back to "flying under the radar" for several years like Bitcoin did. Bitcoin spent long enough being adopted by people who understood and believed in its underlying principles that money and corruption can't undermine it. Other coins have allowed a moral rot to set in and began making questionable changes in direction.
Also, if you released a genuinely superior technology open-source, people would naturally be making forks of it all over the place to try and cash in. Without an established, dominant currency, it effectively splinters everyone into competing collectives, dividing the potential network effects each group can achieve. On top of that, it will suffer the usual conflicts of ideology, where people can't agree on consensus rules, so split off for that reason. I suspect those factors make it almost impossible for something better to come along.
I think it's still early to think about how altruistic Satoshi was. At the end of the day, his supposed coins are still unspent and you never know what his plan was/is about them. At any point in the future, he might end up selling at least a part of those.
I agree though, it's unlikely that someone will come up with the next big thing and not want to be paid for it. On the other hand though, there are lots of very intelligent people doing it just as a donation to everyone. If I was to create somethting like this, I would already know it's unlikely people would like hearing I want to be paid for a supposedly free and decentralized economy.
Therefore, I believe the next big thing will be exactly this: a free currency without premine, better than Bitcoin without sacrificing the decentralization. It will come, it's all about time. Personal opinion..
The points listed by the OP are very important. But the first and foremost point is regarding technology. Bitcoin is the first ever cryptocurrency. All the other cryptocurrencies that have come after Bitcoin (irrespective of the language or algorithm being used) are basically the same as far as the basics are concerned. And that is the main reason why Bitcoin can never be replaced by any of the other cryptocurrencies.
i said these two because we keep talking about decentralization and security but there are a lot of people who don't care about either of them and are only here to make money. if it were anything else 90% of the altcoins would have died already!
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You presented interesting points about Satoshi's conduct regards bitcoin. These are indeed good reasons why an investor should trust bitcoin more than any other crypto currency.
I remembered days ago on the internet there was a statement saying that the end of Satoshi identity's mistery would mean a fall in bitcoin's price. By those news we can see how the identity of the creator behind the currency can affect the market negatively, while anonymity affects it positively or doesn't affect at all. Bitcoin is seen truly as a decentralized currency, while another cryptos aren't, probably because everyone knows the identity behind the currencies, meaning the developer has personal interests Satoshi didn't.
The quote below should represent the answers to all question in the OP. But the main obstacle felt by most new decentralized asset maker was user trust. Currency failure have occurred tens to hundred of time before. But 1 decade now, not a single altcoin has been able to overtake this position from bitcoin, but there is still a possibility in the future.
Quote from:
https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#what-if-someone-creates-a-better-digital-currency What if someone creates a better digital currency?
That can happen. For now, Bitcoin remains by far the most popular decentralized virtual currency, but there can be no guarantee that it will retain that position. There is already a set of alternative currencies inspired by Bitcoin. It is however probably correct to assume that significant improvements would be required for a new currency to overtake Bitcoin in terms of established market, even though this remains unpredictable. Bitcoin could also conceivably adopt improvements of a competing currency so long as it doesn't change fundamental parts of the protocol.
So, why do we still doubt bitcoin after everything seem useful for everyone to get freedom to manage their money?
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Another reason why Bitcoin can't be beaten by another de facto cryptocurrency is that the crypto asset universe is ever expanding, and now Bitcoin investors can diversify into DeFi tokens such as UniSwap, which are essentially stocks and completely different from Bitcoin.
A crypto savvy investor will be diversifying into Uniswap or SushiSwap before something like Litecoin.
DeFi takes the heat out of the race to find a new Bitcoin.
People only have so much disposable income so are unlikely to spend it all on Bitcoin plus Bitcoin alternatives.
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AFAIK it's not a race or what came first, all crypto coins compliment each other to push crypto to higher heights and make adoption easy.
Tbh bitcoin has quite a number of flaws compared to what others can do and if it was based on what has what and does not have bitcoin wouldn't even make top 100. But because every crypto has a role to play in its niche crypto is bound for greatness.
We will have to see how bitcoin evolves from now on, as we know right now its biggest use case is as a store of value which means there is not a lot of need to move it too frequently, this has helped to reduce the impact of the huge number of people that adopted bitcoin during the previous years, but we are reaching a breaking point, if bitcoin is to develop into a world currency then we need the lightning network to gain massive usage during the next years.
Without an established, dominant currency, it effectively splinters everyone into competing collectives, dividing the potential network effects each group can achieve.
DoMAD
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5325584.msg56623341#msg56623341
