Bitcoin is special. A lot has been written on this, but to summarize: Bitcoin was first. It has the Lindy effect: the longer it has been around, the longer it is expected to remain. You can’t re-engineer that on another coin. Bitcoin had the fairest launch: there was no “pre-mine” and for a long while, the value of bitcoin was essentially zero. Now that crypto is obviously valuable, this “immaculate conception” can never happen again. Bitcoin is crypto’s Schelling point: it’s the default for crypto natives and crypto newcomers. Bitcoin has the broadest distribution. It has the deepest markets. It has regulatory clarity. It has the smallest surface area for attack and is the most battle tested. It is the hardest to change so you can count on its monetary properties and technical robustness. It is being used today to protect dissidents and activists. Bitcoin is special.

But what about the rest of “crypto”?

When I got started, there was only bitcoin. I sent Yen by mail to Japan to buy BTC from MtGox. This was late 2012 and early 2013. However, I was a medical student at the time and didn’t have the bandwith to watch the space apart from scrolling the r/bitcoin subreddit between study sessions. When I heard about new efforts in the crypto space: like ETH, XRP, and XLM—I was reflexively opposed. First, I thought it undermined the things above that made bitcoin special. Bitcoin was still quite young at this point, and its Lindy effect wasn’t nearly as robust as today. I saw them as a threat to bitcoin, or at least a distraction. Second, I simply didn’t have the capacity as a busy medical student (and thereafter, a medical resident) to keep up with new projects. And third, I didn’t understand why they couldn’t just build on bitcoin. At the time, the idea was that any successful feature on an altcoin would be easily ported to bitcoin.

In 2014, I made my first experimental foray into altcoins. I bought BitShares (via ProtoShares), which was a first attempt at a DEX and Proof of Stake, and Dan Larimer’s first project (he would later go on to start EOS). And in 2016, I finally caved and bought ETH as a hedge (small, relative to my BTC position) in case my thesis was wrong about all crypto value accruing to bitcoin.

Everything changed in 2017 as the blocksize wars were in full swing. To those unfamiliar, the blocksize wars were basically bitcoin’s fight for survival over industry groups and miners that wished to impose their will on bitcoin developers and users. “Blocksize” refers to the capacity for transactions in a single block on the blockchain, and these industry groups wanted to expand it at the expense of bitcoin’s fundamental decentralization in order to meet their personal business objectives. This spawned all kinds of attacks, the most depraved of which was “Bitcoin Cash” which tried to brand itself as the “Real Bitcoin.” Unfortunately, many newcomers were convinced by these industry leaders and lost a lot of bitcoin to these altcoins and forks (which today have prices approaching 0 BTC).

Suffice to say my dogmatic defensiveness of all things bitcoin was quite strong in 2017, because this dogma from the community was necessary for bitcoin’s survival. The community of users on r/bitcoin, twitter, and bitcointalk had to assert bitcoin’s fundamental values against many well-funded and prominent opponents.

But here’s the thing: bitcoin won, emerged stronger than ever, and I moved on from fights about dogma.

After this, I no longer saw “crypto” as a threat to bitcoin. I was also skeptical of those who reflexively called everything outside of bitcoin a “scam” or “ponzi.” I decided I wanted to try everything. I tried DeFi. I tried NFTs. I tried DEXs. I tried efforts at decentralized web architecture and cryptogaming. Many of these ended up making returns far better than bitcoin. As a loyal bitcoiner to this day, this was a tough reality to accept. And despite the meteoric rise of some of these, bitcoin remained (and remains) the dominant asset in my cryptoportfolio. Of course, many projects failed spectacularly too: Dan Larimer’s early DEX attempt that I mentioned, some terrible NFTs (eg, CryptoKitties), and the usual rug pull or DeFi hack.

However, the point wasn’t to make money, the point was to experiment, to learn, and to see what (if anything) can be brought back to bitcoin. Some may not realize, but NFTs, DEXs, and DeFi were OG concepts in bitcoin. Many of us are advocating that these still make their way to bitcoin (in a meaningful sense, ie, beyond Rare Pepes). Efforts like OP_CTV, StarkWare, ZK-rollups, and Simplicity could unlock this on native bitcoin. Others argue that a separate blockchain is needed, perhaps with a plug-in to bitcoin: Liquid has L-BTC, Terra is building a bridge, Solana has SOL-BTC, even Ethereum has wBTC (note: each of these carry substantial risks that native bitcoin does not). I don’t know the answer and I’m skeptical of those who claim they do.

Parallel to this experimentation, I met more bitcoiners and became more sophisticated (I launched a fund that, among other things, invests in bitcoin companies). I started going to the MIT Bitcoin Expo and other conferences and meeting real people living and breathing bitcoin. I even got to teach Bitcoin to Harvard Business School students.

Amidst this deep dive, I learned about how Satoshi was receptive to a separate blockchain for BitDNS (an early attempt to decentralize web architecture, not too dissimilar from today’s Handshake). I learned about how Hal Finney considered bitcoin-backed bank cash (not too dissimilar from attempts like UST or even wBTC).

“I think it would be possible for BitDNS to be a completely separate network and separate block chain, yet share CPU power with Bitcoin.  The only overlap is to make it so miners can search for proof-of-work for both networks simultaneously. …

Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale. Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately.” - Satoshi Nakamoto, 12/9/2010

“I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks, to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as... well, as Bitcoin based purchases are today.” - Hal Finney, 12/30/2010

As I got more involved, I learned that even the most dogmatic twitter bitcoiners were less dogmatic in real life. Many started bitcoin companies backed by multicoin VCs or multi-asset exchanges or even integrated altcoins into their companies. Many were like me and experimented with many assets to learn or speculate. Many made exceptions for stablecoins or Monero or security tokens, etc. We could talk about these things, because we all knew that we shared the same fundamental belief that bitcoin was special.

In fact, I found that the most fervently dogmatic bitcoiners tended to be newcomers and almost exclusively lurked online. These newcomers were often “toxic”—shouting down others in public who don’t adhere to their worldview, or changing their diet and views on art and family to conform with others who share their dogmatic zealotry. Many of these newcomers have the Zeal of the Convert: they compensate for their meager time in the space with near religious fervor. Meanwhile, the influencers, VCs, podcasters, and even developers most publicly aligned with bitcoin are happy to privately discuss, for example, their CryptoPunks, their experience farming Chia, their preferred stablecoin, or how they (like me) got scammed by Dan Larimer.

Bitcoin is special, but the rest of crypto is still interesting. The problem is that rug pulls, outright scams, and simply bad ideas are everywhere. Given that I have a public audience, I’ve made the ethical determination to focus on bitcoin. Besides, promoting bitcoin is easy: it has no peers. There is nothing else like it. No other coin can compete. It is where I started and is the majority of what I think about. Quite simply, bitcoin has the highest chance to change the world forever—for the better.

Thank you to @resistancemoney who I discussed the “Bitcoin is special” concept with recently.