There's also Monero which is everything Bitcoin was supposed to be and much more. Why bother trying to fix bitcoin when a solution already exists? There's absolutely no need for this layer 2 stuff.
There are thousands of other cryptocurrencies that claim to have better tech than Bitcoin in terms of privacy, speed or fees.
This is the case of having a better technology doesn't matter, Bitcoin came at a very lucky time and also grew organically for many years and had arguably the fairest coin distributions (most coins nowadays are shilled very heavily by it's developers and investors). It's also the most secure and well-known.
Because of those things, it'll be very difficult if not impossible to unseat Bitcoin when it comes to store of value/currency. Bitcoin also sees development in form of lightning network. For all other use cases, I think eth covers most bases and has also developed a very large network of users and developers.
So whatever next big crypto project comes needs to be not just "better", but like at least 10x better.
> There are thousands of other cryptocurrencies that claim to have better tech than Bitcoin in terms of privacy, speed or fees.
Monero isn't just claiming this though. It actually delivers on its promises. It's actually private, authorities are having trouble tracing it. Criminals are already switching to Monero. Transactions are fast and the fees are low. It's mineable by ordinary CPUs, no centralized ASIC/GPU mining operations in China. Since mining is more decentralized, nobody opposes improvements to the Monero blockchain like the bitcoin and ethereum miners do.
> at least 10x better
Monero is pretty much infinitely better. If any coin is positioned to unseat bitcoin it's Monero. If there's any sanity left in this cryptocurrency market this will happen one day.
Fair coin distribution is easy to solve in new coins if all the bitcoin owners get equivalent proportion of the new coin and developers/founders get nothing. But how many are brave enough to create such coin?
> There's absolutely no need for this layer 2 stuff
If XMR usage got big enough it would very much need layer 2 even more, the developers themselves acknowledge this and are upfront about it. These very basic computing problems that have been repeated ad nauseam for a decade now do not magically go away and are actually a lot worse for monero due to ring transactions being much heavier.
Are you really going to store a 2 TB blockchain that needs days of compute to initially confirm so you can transact with your friends privately? The first layer has insane amounts of PoW security baked in at this point, it's not for general consumption anymore.
> the developers themselves acknowledge this and are upfront about it
I'm sure they'll be able to solve any problem that comes up. Monero isn't plagued by miners blocking progress like bitcoin is. I believe the coin will continue to improve.
> Are you really going to store a 2 TB blockchain that needs days of compute to initially confirm so you can transact with your friends privately?
Isn't it possible to prune the blockchain on local nodes?
> worse for monero due to ring transactions being much heavier.
As well as all the rangeproofs that further bloat the chain size. Other confidential blockchain designs allow the removal of rangeproofs for all spent outputs (ie the vast majority).
Do you actually need to confirm the entire history in order to publish transactions? You've already got the result of hashing everything right up at the head of the chain.
This is the case of having a better technology doesn't matter, Bitcoin came at a very lucky time and also grew organically for many years and had arguably the fairest coin distributions (most coins nowadays are shilled very heavily by it's developers and investors). It's also the most secure and well-known.
Because of those things, it'll be very difficult if not impossible to unseat Bitcoin when it comes to store of value/currency. Bitcoin also sees development in form of lightning network. For all other use cases, I think eth covers most bases and has also developed a very large network of users and developers.
So whatever next big crypto project comes needs to be not just "better", but like at least 10x better.