Bitcoin is not crypto

When most people hear the word "crypto," they tend to imagine a uniform concept — speculative internet tokens for hobbyists. But crypto isn't a single thing, it's a category, and a messy one. Calling bitcoin "crypto" is a bit like calling a commercial airplane a "vehicle." Technically accurate, but so broad as to be misleading. The broad category of vehicles includes bicycles, forklifts, sailboats, and monster trucks, but they share almost nothing in terms of purpose, engineering, or appropriate use.

The same is true across the cryptocurrency landscape: bitcoin, stablecoins, altcoins, and memecoins are built differently, governed differently, and exist for entirely different reasons. When people dismiss bitcoin because "crypto is a scam," or invest in a memecoin because "crypto is the future," they are making the same mistake: treating a scooter and a military aircraft as though they belong in the same conversation.

Bitcoin exists in a unique class of its own, with the longest track record of success and dominance. It eclipses all other cryptocurrencies put together, standing out as the largest, most capitalized, and most liquid digital asset network by orders of magnitude. It's earned recognition as the trustworthy bedrock protocol that a global industry of businesses relies upon.

Stablecoins are a fundamentally different type of asset. Rather than representing a new form of money, they are simply digital versions of existing government currencies, designed to hold a fixed price. They function as payment infrastructure, not investable assets, and they depend on centralized institutions to back them.

Everything else falls under the umbrella of altcoins, a catch-all term for the thousands of cryptocurrencies attempting to compete with bitcoin for investment capital. Many altcoins are steered by venture-funded developer teams experimenting with different schools of thought. Ideas about governance structures, greater complexity, or more expressive programmability have attracted genuine interest. Meanwhile, other altcoins aren't intended to be taken seriously at all — such as the infamous memecoins, created as jokes for speculative thrills.

Unlike bitcoin, altcoins do follow the typical patterns of a fad. Short bursts of optimism are consistently followed by a track record of losing ground to bitcoin over time. Altcoins constantly rotate in and out of popularity, and end up competing against one another more than against bitcoin. The vast majority of altcoins are eventually abandoned entirely, collapsing to zero value.

Bitcoin has a unique moat of staying power because aspects of it are extremely difficult to replicate. While bitcoin's open-source code can be easily copied, its network of users can't be, and network effects are powerful. Convincing people on the larger network to migrate to a smaller alternative is very challenging, especially in the context of money where moving value into one asset necessitates moving value out of another.

With by far the largest network of users, bitcoin is also the most decentralized. Making changes to the way bitcoin works requires agreement from the largest and most diverse group of people. Resistance to change creates confidence for people who wish to build technology and businesses on top of bitcoin's infrastructure. By contrast, altcoins are known to undergo large fundamental changes over time which lead to disruption and uncertainty among investors and builders.

While the broader world of "crypto" can feel chaotic and instill doubts about longevity, bitcoin should be viewed separately. Unlike altcoins, bitcoin is a serious protocol consistently growing in adoption at the highest levels of institutional finance.