I wouldn't use "Worse is Better" as a stand-in for first-mover advantage, since (as you say) there are times when the benefit of speed more than pays for the in

I wouldn't use "Worse is Better" as a stand-in for first-mover advantage, since (as you say) there are times when the benefit of speed more than pays for the increase risk of unknowns. I'd reserve Worse is Better for cases where (a) that speed advantage was gained by specifically choosing to ignore/hack-around a known problem, and (b) that problem/hack becomes worse due to the inertia of this approach. The classic example is C, which has spread far and wide, as a foundation for almost all of the modern computing house-of-cards. Yet this adoption has come with memory management problems (and their associated security exploits), a foot-gun approach to macros, etc. when such issues are literally non-existent in contemporary languages like Lisp, Scheme, ML, Prolog, etc. A military example might be the trench warfare of WW1: a quick way to avoid machine gun fire, which froze armies in place for years. A financial example might be loan sharks. In Bitcoin's case, the hack of trusting the longest chain and incentivising hashcash to reduce spam/overtaking has resulted in today's energy-hungry monstrosity.