For most people money is something that just exists. In order to receive money, someone needs to be willing to spend this money on you. This conception of money might lead to the false assumption that money is “neutral” and does not have any properties that are worth discussing. The process of issuing new money is highly obfuscated and hidden in the balance sheets of central and private banks. In contrast, for cryptocurrencies this process has become crystal clear. Mining, presales and proof of burn are concepts that have been tried out.



However, to make a forecast which cryptocurrency will play the dominant role in the future is hard. There are many possible stable equilibria where one cryptocurrency is widely accepted and just for that reason others accept it as well. From a game theoretic perspective currencies are coordination games. If everyone around you accepts a specific currency you will most likely do so as well. If no one does, you wouldn’t either.



In this ongoing cryptocurrency game, Bitcoin is currently the Schelling point for the simple reason that it was the first currency of this kind and currently therefore the biggest. Other than that, there is no good reason to join Bitcoin over an unlimited number of copies. In fact, currently a few million people are using Bitcoin. If a decent part of the world’s economy would start using Bitcoin as a currency, this would mean an incredible shift of wealth towards the early adopters. This is highly unlikely because it requires adoption of those who are not favored in any way by this wealth shift. This would only happen with a complete lack of alternatives: only if traditional fiat money widely were in acute danger of collapse and no other, more favorable crypto currencies were in place.



Putting aside for the moment that regulatory instances make this scenario highly unlikely, let’s imagine a few big companies like Amazon, Walmart and Apple would start a cryptocurrency together with similar rules to Bitcoin, like fixed supply and decentralized processing. The initial distribution, however, would be a mix of controlling most of the money themselves and distributing it to customers. This currency would immediately make Bitcoin irrelevant.