[arthurcolle]

I mean, Bitcoin was the first one. It is interesting in its approach (attempt?) to solving the so-called Byzantine generals problem[0], utilizing a proof-of-work consensus algorithm for security with an issuance mechanism tied to transaction validation. A little bit later, some legendary humans used it to facilitate contraband marketplace operations over the Web. Other crypto-asset systems emerged such as Ethereum, further pushing this currency mechanism model quite a bit further, enhancing the ease of creating tokens on top of the system, and fundamentally enabling programmatic execution of monetary transfers with smart contracts, bits of code that move the money around instead of exclusively having people move an asset around manually. Smart contracts are also interesting but have become widely used and abused, sometimes even exploited by knowledgeable EVM hackers that have automatic the detection and exploitation systems. The move to MEV exploitation and mitigation as a service by operators such as Flashbots has been an interesting evolution in these systems, indicating the dynamic evolution of this space.

I don't believe that Bitcoin will necessary become the de facto Internet money standard. I think it's great, and the price volatility is pretty fun to trade (ask me about bitcoin options trading circa 2017 sometime).

It will probably have value for an arbitrary amount of time depending on regulatory pressures among many other factors but given the rapid pace of innovation in the space, I think other systems can and will become equally or substantially more valuable. I think that the transaction fees are pretty reasonable with Bitcoin, but there are a few other competing systems that I think also show a tremendous amount of promise, such as Algorand or Polkadot. I think the complexity of parachains will eventually need to be reworked for Polkadot, but Algorand in particular has all the flexibility of Ethereum's smart contract mechanisms without the pains of gas fee volatility.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault