Source: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-bitcoin-is-different-e17b813fd947

Real Innovation

To really understand the value proposition of Bitcoin, it helps to look at a bit of history. It’s tempting to think that the newest ICO or altcoin is the one that will finally “improve” Bitcoin and fix all of its problems and that Bitcoin will be relegated to the dustbin of history due to its lack of some “feature”. Indeed, nearly every altcoin, ICO or hardfork thinks that they’re being innovative in some fundamental way. What’s missed is that the biggest innovation has already happened.

Decentralized digital scarcity is the real innovation and Bitcoin was the first, and, as this article will make clear, continues to be the only such coin. All the other so-called innovations such as faster confirmation times, changing to proof-of-whatever, Turing completeness, different signature algorithm, different transaction ordering method and even privacy, are really tiny variations on the giant innovation that is Bitcoin.

It’s important to remember here that alternatives to Bitcoin have been proposed since 2011 and none of them have even come close to displacing Bitcoin in terms of price, usage or security. IxCoin was a clone of Bitcoin created in 2011 with larger block rewards and a premine (large number of coins sent to the creator). Tenebrix was an altcoin created in 2011 that tried to add GPU resistance and again had a large premine. Solidcoin was another altcoin created in 2011 with faster block times and again, a premine. About the only ones that survived (and not living out a zombie existence) out of that early altcoin era are Namecoin and Litecoin, which distinguished themselves by NOT having a premine.

The Network Effect

Because Bitcoin has the largest network and gains from the network effect, other coins essentially are playing a giant game of catch-up. Bitcoin is the 7-day week and every other altcoin is a slight variation (Let’s have 4-day weeks! Let’s make the day 18 hours! Let’s rename the days to something different! Let’s vary week lengths according to the whims of a central authority!) Needless to say, these types of “innovations” are, at best, minor and are generally not adopted. This is because the network effect of Bitcoin grows over time and the people using the network optimize toward the standards of the network, locking more and more people in.

As the network grows, what we see is that subtle, unseen benefits accrue to each norm. What may, on the surface seem inefficient actually has second and third order effects that benefit the people conforming to the norm. For example, a car does not fly or go on water because the car has been optimized for use on solid ground. The lack of extra features makes the car more useful since it’s easier to park (smaller size than a theoretical boat/car/plane hybrid), cheaper to maintain and get fuel for, etc.

In addition, these norms have withstood the test of time and have proven their resilience in ways that are not obvious. You would not want to be the first person to fly in a car/plane hybrid, for example, because you wouldn’t know how safe such a vehicle is. Something that’s been around has proven its relative security. Bitcoin, in a sense, has the world’s richest bug bounty to reveal any security flaws. As a result, Bitcoin has proven its security with the only thing that can really test it: time. Every other coin is much younger and/or has proven to be less secure.

Decentralization

The other main property of Bitcoin that no other coin has is decentralization. By decentralized, I mean that Bitcoin does not have a single point of failure or choke point. Every other coin has a founder or a company that created their coin and they have the most influence over the coin. A hard fork (a backwards incompatible change) that’s forced on the user, for example, is an indication that the coin is pretty centralized.

Centralized coins have the “advantage” of being able to change things quickly in response to market demand. Centralization is certainly a good thing for businesses as they are often trying to make a profit by providing some good or service to their customers. A centralized business can better respond to market demand and change what they sell for better profits.

For money, however, centralization is a bad thing. First, one of the main value propositions for a store of value is in being something that doesn’t change qualitatively (aka immutability). A store of value requires that its qualities stay the same or get better over time. A change that undermines its qualities (e.g. inflation of supply, decreasing of acceptance, change of security) drastically changes the utility of money as a store of value.

Second, centralization of currency has a tendency to change the rules, often to catastrophic effect. Indeed, 20th century economics is the story of central banks slowly degrading fiat money’s store of value utility. The average fiat currency has a lifespan of 27 years for this reason, despite the backing of powerful entities like governments and near universal usage within an entire country as a medium of exchange. “Features”, ability to react quickly and usage simply do not matter nearly as much to the survival of a currency as scarcity and immutability.

Every cryptocurrency and ICO other than Bitcoin is centralized. For an ICO, this is obvious. The entity that issues the ICO and creates the token is the centralized party. They issued the coin and thus can change the token’s usage, alter the coin’s incentives or issue additional tokens. They can also refuse to accept certain tokens for their good or service.

Altcoins have the same problem, though not in such an obvious way. Usually the creator is the de facto dictator for the coin and can do the same things that a government can. Taxes (dev tax, storage tax, etc), inflation, picking winners and losers (DAO, proof-of-X change, etc) are often decided by the creators. As a holder of an altcoin, you have to trust not just the current leader, but all future leaders of the coin to not confiscate, tax away or inflate away your coins. In other words, altcoins and ICOs are not qualitatively different than fiat. In altcoin and ICO-land, you are not sovereign over your own coins!

This is particularly acute in the biggest “competitor” to Bitcoin: Ethereum. By any measure, Ethereum is centrally controlled. Ethereum has had at least 5 hard forks where users were forced to upgrade. They’ve bailed out bad decision making with the DAO. They are now even talking about a new storage tax. The centralized control was shown early in their large premine.

Bitcoin is different. One of the greatest things that Satoshi did was disappear. In the early days of Bitcoin, Satoshi controlled a lot of what was developed. By disappearing, we’ve now got a situation where parties that don’t like each other (users of various affiliations) all have some say in how the network is run. Every upgrade is voluntary (i.e. soft forks) and does not force anyone to do anything to keep their Bitcoin. In other words, there’s no single point of failure. Bitcoin has a system where even if a whole group of developers got hit by a bus, there are multiple open source implementations that can continue to offer choices to every user. In Bitcoin, you are sovereign over your own bitcoins.

This is a very good thing as there’s no central authority that can diminish the utility of your coins. That means Bitcoin is actually scarce (instead of theoretically or temporarily scarce), won’t change qualitatively without everyone’s consent and is thus a good store of value.