A few days/weeks ago, someone asked if bitcoin was still really the best blockchain. Have none of the other coins made **any** improvements, they asked.
This is social media, so of course I can't find the post now, but if you're out there, here's my response.
1. As other responders suggested, Monero might be technologically better. It hasn't been as battle tested as bitcoin, but then again, nothing has. I'm not aware of protocol level issues being found in Monero.
2. Bitcoin has a narrow focus*. Many subsequent projects are trying to be everything to everyone (smart contracts), or applying blockchain to solve problems that are better solved by other distributed technologies/algorithms.
3. Perhaps most importantly, Bitcoin **has** changed over the past 15 years. It didn't originally have a seed phrase to back up your wallet, for example. That came later. Now we have segwit, taproot, multi-sig, and the lightning network too. A lot has changed. It's just things that are barely visible to people who are not Bitcoin developers or very plugged into the development scene. But the main use case of entering a wallet address and sending some coin still works pretty much the same (okay, that's not true for the lightning network, but the other changes were pretty close to invisible).
* Yes, I know some people are trying expand the scope of what Bitcoin can do, but even there we're seeing pretty modest [proposed] changes to the protocol itself.
Dr. Hax
npub16v…meqha
2024-07-29 07:13:08
Author Public Key
npub16v82nr4xt62nlydtj0mtxr49r6enc5r0sl2f7cq2zwdw7q92j5gs8meqhaPublished at
2024-07-29 07:13:08Event JSON
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"content": "A few days/weeks ago, someone asked if bitcoin was still really the best blockchain. Have none of the other coins made **any** improvements, they asked.\n\nThis is social media, so of course I can't find the post now, but if you're out there, here's my response.\n\n1. As other responders suggested, Monero might be technologically better. It hasn't been as battle tested as bitcoin, but then again, nothing has. I'm not aware of protocol level issues being found in Monero.\n\n2. Bitcoin has a narrow focus*. Many subsequent projects are trying to be everything to everyone (smart contracts), or applying blockchain to solve problems that are better solved by other distributed technologies/algorithms.\n\n3. Perhaps most importantly, Bitcoin **has** changed over the past 15 years. It didn't originally have a seed phrase to back up your wallet, for example. That came later. Now we have segwit, taproot, multi-sig, and the lightning network too. A lot has changed. It's just things that are barely visible to people who are not Bitcoin developers or very plugged into the development scene. But the main use case of entering a wallet address and sending some coin still works pretty much the same (okay, that's not true for the lightning network, but the other changes were pretty close to invisible).\n\n\n* Yes, I know some people are trying expand the scope of what Bitcoin can do, but even there we're seeing pretty modest [proposed] changes to the protocol itself.",
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}