Oh how I love a good laugh. The article argues that while Bitcoin may enjoy a first-mover advantage ‘at the moment’ the underlying technology, the blockchain technology is open, meaning that anyone could create a better Bitcoin at anytime.
While this may sound sensible to many, it hits upon a hard fact that none have ever been successful at dethroning Bitcoin as the hardest, most sound, digital money the world has ever seen.
A concept widely known as ‘immaculate conception’ applies to Bitcoin as the birth of Bitcoin is something that can never be replicated in the same manner in any foreseeable future. Bitcoin is an open sourced, open participation, open to attack system for sound money, creating such a system implies that Bitcoin must be very fragile to attacks in its infancy and such is certainly the case. In the early days of Bitcoin, it only takes a few relatively fast computer to destroy the immutability of the blockchain by reorganizing the blocks through a 51% attack and even the code can easily be colluded to change with ease as there are still a very small number of nodes and miners. But as time passes, the network grows ever larger to the point that it is now, the point where even the largest government on Earth have no chance of shutting it down with force. If other were to mimick Bitcoin now, they would have been attacked, even pranked into oblivion, and the only way for any project that seeks to immitate bitcoin can hope to survive is to have a centralized control or a backdoor into the system in such case it is no longer the sound money that Bitcoin is.
In short, the barrier of entry into the space of open, neutral, sound money is not only very high, it’s inconceivable and anyone who tries will be left with a worthless knockoff that does not offer the value nor the utility that Bitcoin offers.