Gopher and HTTP came out at around the same time and were contenders from the beginning. This is very different than the situation with cryptocurrencies, where

Gopher and HTTP came out at around the same time and were contenders from the beginning. This is very different than the situation with cryptocurrencies, where Bitcoin came out long before the competing derivatives, and where mindshare and market capitalization of alternative cryptocurrencies has always been insignificant compared to BTC. Bitcoin could be more properly compared to HTTP, and alternative cryptocurrencies as protocols that are slighty modified versions of HTTP that no one uses.