Bitcoin is the Future of Money, Not Just Another Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin, Not Crypto.

But why?

Isn’t Bitcoin just another cryptocurrency? The answer is no: There are key real differences between Bitcoin and every other ‘Crypto’. 

VC Premine Coins

Premining a coin is giving yourself and your buddies some, or all of the early supply. Venture capitalists got bored and impatient of waiting 8-10 years for investments to pay off, so they naturally got interested in ‘crypto’ which effectively enables a quick exit and profit. 

Most of the coins you hear hyped up have centralized foundations behind the coin, or perhaps a special admin key to control it. These coins are what’s known as DINO — Decentralized in Name Only. 

Insiders joke about dumping on you. Just see for example Chamath & David Sacks publicly joking about getting Solana at a discount and then dumping their Solana bags here. There’s a ‘Crypto’ game played where the insiders get coins at a very cheap price, say $0.003 and then hype the coin up, pay or convince a ‘crypto’ exchange to list it, and dump the coin while the price is pumping to say, $0.30. Meanwhile the actual liquidity on the order book is extremely thin, so it’s not possible for non-insider individuals to actually sell large quantities of the coin without also moving the price dramatically. So by the time the average person has heard about these coins, they are buying someone’s premined bags, hoping to dump the coin onto a ‘greater fool’. As MrHodl has said, with shitcoins you’re looking for a greater fool to dump on. With bitcoin, you’re looking for the greater fool to buy from. 

The other big red flag is that these altcoins are often valued on some tiny fraction of the possible supply. For example, In the case of Scam Bankster-Fraud of FTX/Alameda, they were valuing their pet “cryptos” (e.g. FTT, SRM, OXY, MAPS) based on a very tiny portion of the actual total supply. It’s easy to manipulate the value when it’s only a small amount that actually trades on the platform, while most of the supply is locked away or held back by insiders. In doing so, they were able to buy all kinds of sports arena naming rights, politicians, media and industry support. 

Now contrast this with Bitcoin which had:

• A fair launch that was telegraphed in advance, with no premine

• Satoshi specifically made the genesis block (the first ever bitcoin block) coins unspendable 

• Satoshi didn’t dump his large stack of early coins

• Satoshi did not try to aggressively mine as many coins as possible, rather the focus was more about supporting the network in its infancy

• Bitcoin did not really trade with a specified price until much later on, in 2010 (after the network launched Jan 3 2009)

• At the time Bitcoin was launched, there was no culture and industry around pumping and dumping these “cryptos”. 

Crypto Coins Don’t Have Genuine Grassroots Communities

These ‘cryptos’ don’t have anywhere near the same level of real flesh and blood people on the ground organising meetups, building circular economies, doing education, providing services and helping teach people. Bitcoin does. Bitcoin has Bitcoinbeach, Bitcoinekasi, Bitcoinjungle, BitcoinbeachBR, Bitcoinisland and many more. 

Instead, coins like Solana had fake volume with fake people in an overleveraged ecosystem sponsored by a ponzi operator, SBF. 

“The developers, with names including Surya Khosla, Larry Jarry, 0xGhostchain and Goki Rajesh, succeeded in creating trading and staking services that attracted a claimed $7.5 billion in deposits, known as ‘TVL’ or total value locked…. That $7.5 billion in deposits made up the lion’s share of all the money tallied on Solana services in early fall of 2021, when the chain’s DeFi deposits totaled roughly $10.5 billion.”

There is a sordid history of “crypto” coins or exchanges with fake volume so as to juice the metrics and drive hype. It was rumoured for years that overseas exchanges had fake volume with wash trades to present an appearance of genuine liquidity and users, to attract more users and customers. 

‘GameFi’ is another example where the “crypto” VCs pushed very questionable coins that had little sustainable adoption. Consider the case of Axie Infinity which had a range of people shilling the future of ‘play to earn’ when really it was just altcoin-inflation-financed. After a while the ‘earn’ dried up and the usage dropped dramatically. 

Contrast this with Bitcoin: which has many meetups and conferences all around the world, a vibrant online community of developers, educators, builders, advocates. There are numerous long standing Bitcoin publications, podcasts, many of which are created for the sake of educating people about why fiat currency is a scam and that they should upgrade to using Bitcoin. 

They Don’t Focus on Making It Cheap to Verify

Various altcoins are literally impossible for an average person to validate, being permissioned systems. Many others are highly costly or impractical. But even setting aside possibility or practicality, it also comes to culture. Bitcoin’s enthusiast culture prioritizes and praises verifying rather than simply trusting. Instead of supporting the practice of leaving coins on someone else’s platform, Bitcoiners instead discourage custodialism. 

With Bitcoin, one distinguishing factor is its widespread, decentralized validation. When you run a Bitcoin node it is checking the rules of Bitcoin blocks and transactions, and only valid transactions will show up on your node. It will literally not show you invalid transactions, and this is how the ecosystem protects itself against fractional reserve scammers and fraudsters. Bitcoin developers have focused on keeping the costs of running a Bitcoin node cheap, and for this reason there are many who run Bitcoin nodes on old computers, cheap computers, or even single board devices like Raspberry Pis. 

The Altcoins Come and Go

Because there’s only so many people you can buy off, and there’s not really a sustainable grassroots community behind these altcoins, they tend to come and go very often. Only a few actually show some staying power for the longer term. Even from a price point of view, see Swan Lead Analyst Sam’s post, talking about how of the 20,000 altcoins, so many of them are essentially ‘one hit wonders’ that rarely ever come back to prior cycle highs in the future. 

Name Recognition

If you even spend a few minutes browsing google trends data, you can see that Bitcoin dominates ‘crypto’ and is searched for far more often than altcoins. See for example this 3 way google search trend between Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana from 1/1/2015:

Which do you think is more sustainably and comfortably growing regardless of bull and bear seasons? 

Even in adoption surveys in various countries, it’s clear that Bitcoin is the brand that most people know and love. If people have heard of “cryptocurrency” it’s almost for sure they know about Bitcoin. For example see this survey data from Australia showing that 92% of Australians had heard of at least one ‘crypto’, with 90.8% of respondents having heard about Bitcoin. Bitcoin continues to grow in brand awareness because it was first and it represents the zero to one moment, like discovering fire or inventing the printing press. 

Conclusion

Bitcoin is the actually scarce, decentralized, open, verifiable, permissionless system. It’s common for newcomers to feel like they are “late to Bitcoin” but in truth, global adoption of Bitcoin is still in the early phases. What’s required is more people who know and understand why the fiat system is a poor fit for the needs of humanity. And the truth is, unless you’re an insider, you’re usually late to any other Crypto, because it is not designed to be long-lived, like Bitcoin.

We need an open, sound and scarce monetary system: Bitcoin. Accept no substitute.