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what's the value in holding bitcoin versus any other cryptocurrency? genuine question here. i've never understood the value of bitcoin because while bitcoins t

• whoisjohnkid 6y ago
  I highly recommend the book The Bitcoin Standard it dives into this question in depth. Gist is Bitcoin was the first to market, has the biggest decentralized network, has been around the longest, hasn’t been hacked, has no known owner with any vested interests. All other cryptos are pretty much piggy backing off of Bitcoin’s discoveries for fun or profit ... or trying to make it better.
• dcolkitt 6y ago
  On the technical merits, I think Bitcoin is actually rather behind other blockchains. But, remember that money is a Schelling point. There's a huge first mover advantage. Money, in any form, is only valuable because we expect others to continue to value it into the future. The reason that gold is used as a monetary asset, whereas rhodium is not despite being as rare, is because gold arrived earlier in history. One could also that the Bitcoin community's conservative nature also lends it credence as a long term store of value. Ethereum as a protocol much more amenable to technical innovation. But if you're in the "stay rich" business, instead of the "get rich" business, than that can be a bug not a feature.
• lostmsu 6y ago
  Not any other, but you should only deal in Bitcoin of all cryptocurrencies based on the same proof-of-work algorithm (mostly smaller Bitcoin forks), because Bitcoin miners, having a majority of hashrate, can perform 50%+1 attacks on other currencies using the same algorithm. The same applies to each other proof-of-work algorithm individually like Ethash (Ethereum), Equihash (ZCash), etc.