Cryptocurrencies have zero intrinsic value. If only one person owned all the bitcoins and refused to part with any of it, the world wouldn’t accept its use, and

Cryptocurrencies have zero intrinsic value. If only one person owned all the bitcoins and refused to part with any of it, the world wouldn’t accept its use, and would just create another currency with similar properties. Ditto for every altcoin. This is why altcoins haven’t displaced Bitcoin: touting technological advancements over and above the benchmark set by Bitcoin is more or less irrelevant, except to the extent the narrative underlying it produces a network effect to compete with Bitcoin’s. But there’s no logical reason why Bitcoin’s network effect should ever be exceeded — Bitcoin has the first-mover advantage, and is the most widely recognized cryptocurrency, with the safest and simplest technical implementation which is clearly capable of meeting the needs of cryptocurrency users. Speculative value storage is the only real world use case of cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin does it better.