Technical maximalism killed economical maximalism: How Bitcoin (BTC) is on track to lose its first-mover advantage, and how a cacaphony of multiple coins threatens to destroy Bitcoin, the idea.

When my mother calls me, she often asks „How is Bitcoin doing?“. I answer with telling about my work as an editor of Bitcoin blog.de, which is a German blog, sponsored by Bitcoin .de. My articles are aggregated by Bitcoin -Live.de, where you also find links to articles of btc -echo.de.

I – and many other industry peers – are used to identify ourselves with the brand Bitcoin . It is a strong word, perfect to describe „coins minted in bits“, much better than cryptocurrencies or digital currencies . Bitcoin is here since 2009. The word does not only mean a specific currency: It means a movement for a better money; the vision of a global currency union with stateless hard money. Bitcoin is the term to represent the whole story.

For a long time, this was absolutely reasonable. Bitcoin was the whole thing. Altcoins have been a niche, technical experiments of get rich schemes, while „blockchain-technology“ has been a buzzword-bingo for advisors of banks. If you wanted to talk about the real thing, about the money, the revolution, the technology – you talked about „Bitcoin“. There is no stronger word for it.

When words become lies

This, however, is no longer true. Bitcoin, the currency, has split from Bitcoin, the idea. Bitcoin blog.de reports about a variety of digital currencies; bitcoin .de enables the trade of four cryptocurrencies; news about bitcoin (btc) have become a minority at sites like Bitcoin -Live.de and btc -echo.de.

The trend is obvious and easy to confirm: Look at the dominance index of coinmarketcap, in which Bitcoin‘s dominance felt from 85 to less than 40 percent. Look at the news in magazines, at the trading volume of exchanges, the number of daily transactions, subscriptions in subredds, tweets, github commits, startups, threads in forums – you‘ll find the same trend everywhere: Bitcoin lost its dominance and it is no longer representative for the whole thing.

Using Bitcoin, like we used it, has become misleading. Maybe it would be fair to rebrand Bitcoin (BTC) as Bitcoin Core, to make it clear for newcomers that BTC, the currency, is not Bitcoin, the idea.

On a Bitcoin conference, nobody talks about bitcoin, the currency

I did not realize how far this has gone – up to the point of irreversibility – until I attended the UNCHAIN-conference in Hamburg, Germany.

To be clear, this conference was not organized by bankers, advisors, altcoin-pumpers, ICO-promoters or blockchain-technologists. It was organized by longterm Bitcoiners from Hamburg: by people which live the vision of monetary freedom and love Bitcoin the idea.

The full name of the conference was „UNCHAIN: Bitcoin and blockchain convention“. The partner of UNCHAIN was Latin American Bitcoin conference La Bitconf , and moderator Aaron Koenig weared a t-shirt in superman-style, in which the Superman-S was replaced by a Bitcoin -B. And so on. The conference was all about Bitcoin , the vision. But Bitcoin (BTC), the currency, was nearly offtopic.

There have been exactly two talks focused on bitcoin: One about the Lightning Network, one about Bitcoin Cash. Everything else was about multi-coin applications, smart contracts, token, ICO and other coins. No new startup uses exclusively Bitcoin. Most use a multiversum of coins, some EOS, Ripple or Ethereum.