What unique properties does Bitcoin have that makes it useful that other cryptocurrencies don't, beside first mover advantage?
Bitcoin's value (not in terms of money, but in terms of usefullness) is an emergent property of the combination of proof of work, the difficulty adjustment, and its peer-to-peer nature. Other cryptocurrencies suffer because their founders have changed one or more of those properties in an attempt to "fix bitcoin" (bigger blocks! faster blocks! more blocks!), but that cripples the resulting emergent value.
If Bitcoin is directly cloned as Coinbit, and miners flock to it, and it achieves a greater total hash rate than Bitcoin, then its value supersedes Bitcoin's. Bitcoin's first mover advantage makes this unlikely (though non-zero).
Why do we need digital scarcity, exactly?
>Other cryptocurrencies are less secure (the many direct forks, such as Bitcoin Cash and the like), less decentralized (Solana, BNB), less permissionless (any system that can be halted by its operators) or less scarce (Ethereum's emission schedule can be changed by a single organisation).
Ok, we agree that other cryptos are bad too.
>Bitcoin's value (not in terms of money, but in terms of usefulness) is an emergent property of the combination of proof of work, the difficulty adjustment, and its peer-to-peer nature.
But what is that useful to do? I agree cryptography and blockchains are nifty, but why do 1000's of decentralized computers need to do the work (and therefore duplicate/waste resources)? Couldn't one computer do it and make their work public so anyone/everyone could check their work?
You'll say something ambiguous thing about trust, but please give a concrete example when the above wouldn't work. Visa (and it's shareholders) have hundreds of billions of USD worth of incentive not to fuck up transactions (enough to buy enough electricity and ASICs to become 51% of miners), so why don't we let them do the work and then we check their work?
Is that bad because it's what we do now and it works?
Sure you could let Visa do this (as they and Mastercard handle most online payments now anyways), and it would probably work as well as Visa/Mastercard work now, but for some people that is not good enough.
1. Differentiate clearing (telling you you now have some money) and settlement (you getting the money you "have"). For Visa and Mastercard the latter takes days or more.
2. Permissionless means that you don't need any entity's permission to transact. Visa and Mastercard definitely require permission, and on occassion don't give it for various legal but "immoral" things like porn, Wikileaks, and who knows what in the future.
3. Borderless is kind of similar to permissionless. As soon as you bring in legacy behemoths like Visa into it, this kind of goes away.
4. With decentralization, fees are determined objectively (you pay to get in, and if there is enough demand, regardless of price, blocks are full). A monopolist would charge as much as they could get away with, sometimes even if that means no transactions are being performed.
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I would say that with a Visa(like) company, you definitely lose 2, and 4 will probably have some bullshit involved.
It's 100% voluntary and makes zero promise of some fantastical ROI (unlike every non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency).
Bitcoin isn't a "system" unless you're already in it. If you're not already in it, you have to consider the whole economy and Bitcoin's "job to be done" inside it.
At which point there's two problems. One, you have to get into the system which means the things people are claiming "aren't crypto" like exchanges are, in fact, part of it. Two, it doesn't necessarily possess scarcity, because users have the option to fork Bitcoin rather than pay you to use it.
SBF is deeply tied to Solana. It's reported SBF/FTX/Alameda were sitting on close to $1bn worth of Solana up to a few days ago. Some are apparently locked. This makes him the biggest holder of Solana. Centralized indeed. Now of course these "$1bn" are in that worthless Solana scamcoin which already fell from $32 to $13 since the news. So I take that that $1bn is now more like $400m or something, and shrinking fast.
It's possible that, like with Serum, SBF was involved in the creation of Solana from the very start (I take it more independent journalist are going to dig on that: I don't expect mainstream media to do much research that said).
Bitcoin has a real multi stakeholder maintainership, where no single party can hard fork the currency or change the rules in any important way from the ones the users signed up for. This is what people mean when they say hard forks should be close to impossible to pull off. The only exceptions are where there is absolute consensus, such as pure security issues.
Closely related to the above, the issuance model is clearly known to everyone in advance and will not change. The issuance is not the same thing as the consensus rules. That helps force stakeholders to play fair.
There is no founder or foreground representative that has an undue influence in development. Even the core developers will have to convince everyone that their changes are sound and will not change the rules of anyone's investment, and more often than not, ends up with them dropped if consensus can not be reached.
Again related to the above, there was no pre-mine. Since there was no central party, no one owned any coins before the public blockchain started. So no one could sell or promise any future winnings. There's this whole founding myth to build culture on, and npt everything may be true, but what's clear is that an effort was made to prove there was no pre-mine (someone included today's paper in the genesis block, before which per the protocol no coins can exist).
The first mover advantage does not enter this. You could start a new serious attempt at a currency along the same lines as above, but very few bother when you are competing with outright scams. Personally I believe we have to wait some time to shake out the scammers before we can see any serious attempts at competing.
