Jimmy Song, in his latest Medium Post, has strongly mentioned that Bitcoin is here to stay and other Altcoins and ICOs are nowhere close in competing with Bitcoin. He also explains in detail “Why Bitcoin is Different”.

Jimmy Song – Bitcoin Developer

Jimmy Song did his graduation from the University of Michigan with a degree in Mathematics in 1998. He worked as a Software Developer for various companies and in 2014 he joined Monetas for bitcoin integration. After that, he remained a Bitcoin developer for companies like Armory Technologies. He worked his way up to become a principal architect for Paxos for creating blockchain solutions.

He is a well-known and respected personality in the Bitcoin community and runs a Programming Blockchain training program for students by traveling around the world. In 2018, he joined Blockchain Capital as a Venture partner. Notably, Jimmy Song is a Bitcoin Maximist and has always supported it in all his shows and tweets.

Why Bitcoin is Different

In the recent Medium post by Jimmy song, he has answered the important questions on “What makes Bitcoin Different?” and “Why It is difficult to replicate Bitcoin in spite of so many Altcoins/Forks and ICO tokens?”.

In the post, he mentions three major reasons that distinguish Bitcoin from other coins:

Real Innovation

Jimmy says that the biggest innovation has already been accomplished by Bitcoin and that innovation is a “Decentralized Digital Scarcity”. All other altcoins, ICO or hardforks can boost themselves with useful new innovation/features, but they are very tiny compared to the towering innovation by Bitcoin.

He goes on to explain that alternatives to Bitcoin have been proposed right from 2011 and also mentions some of the altcoins and ICOs that existed once, but disappeared over time. IxCoin, Tenebrix, Solidcoin and several others he mentions which are completely dead now.

Also, he notes that some ICOs in the past that collected a huge sum of BTC (before Ethereum was created ICOs were done using Bitcoin) to the tune of 2000 BTC to 5000 BTC. However, they performed very poorly and didn’t provide any utility. Mastercoin and Factom are some of the ICOs that failed miserably.

Network Effect

Jimmy mentions Network Effect to be another important reason for Bitcoin to rule the cryptocurrency space for the years to come. Bitcoin has the largest network and as time goes by, it adds more people to the network. The Network effect plays in favor of Bitcoin, because of the fact that Bitcoin grows in utility since it has the most users. He also compares it to the example of getting accessories easily for a popular phone more than a phone that is rare.

Decentralization

The other major advantage Bitcoin has over other altcoins/ICOs is that it is completely decentralized and avoids a single point of failure. Other coins have founders to influence the direction in which the coin should travel, which is bad since that makes them prone to centralization. He then mentions that centralized authority might be suited for corporate companies, but is bad for currencies since the “quality” should stay the same for money or get better by time.

Also, the centralized actors can change the rules of the currency in their favor. Other than Bitcoin, all other altcoins/ICOs have “centralization attributes” and the creator is the dictator, acting just like the government controlling their people. He notes that Ethereum as an example where the founder Vitalik dictated much of the decisions on his own (eg: Hard Fork after DAO hack, Proof of stake change) and enforced these quite strictly. So, Altcoins/ICOs are no different from fiat since both are centralized to a significant extent, according to Jimmy.

In the post, he emphasizes that Bitcoin cannot change without everyone’s consent and this makes it difficult to modify its scarcity, where other coins it appears only on paper or is temporary. He also credits Sathosi for disappearing at the initial stage itself to allow it to remain fully decentralized.

Difficult to Dethrone Bitcoin

The above-mentioned points by Jimmy seem to be sound arguments that it is difficult to dethrone Bitcoin from the top spot easily, due to the characteristics that no altcoin/ICO posses. He concludes by saying that a big revolution such as Bitcoin is required to displace it. Meanwhile, tweaking a few variables (like adding privacy as a feature) is not enough and thousands of coins tried to replicate the properties over several years, but they failed miserably. That is why Bitcoin remains a Revolution.