For some reason, Bitcoin rubs a lot of people the wrong way. And more particularly, the subset of Bitcoiners (myself included) who think that Bitcoin is most likely to accrue an overwhelming amount of the value that gravitates towards cryptocurrencies. I believe this to be true based on many years of observing Bitcoin in the wild. Expressing this belief is often controversial in a world in which many affinity scams are attempting to replicate Bitcoin's organic success.

As our friend Ryan points out, the Network's existing characteristics coupled with its entrenched network effects and mindshare make usurping it very very difficult. I would argue that usurping Bitcoin at this point may be impossible because of the sheer amount of attention that surrounds any launch of a new cryptocurrency these days. Those attempting to replicate Bitcoin's organic success come to find that they cannot replicate the state of the world and the inherent collective unawareness of cryptocurrencies that existed in January of 2009. Only a time machine can do that.

Bitcoin's focus on being as secure, robust, private, and decentralized as possible has allowed it to get to this point. As it stands today, more than a decade into this protocol's existence, Bitcoin is still easily accessible to the masses who want to run full nodes, the amount of hashrate dedicated to securing the ledger has never been greater, and its ubiquity in the minds of the masses and pop culture has never been more dominant when compared to its peers. Bitcoin is at the stage where it is starting to be seriously considered a safe haven asset in the eyes of money managers.

At this point, its future success seems to hinge on its ability to continue producing blocks roughly every ten minutes. Everything else is either an added benefit or noise.

Final thought...

Ready to rip a beach read.