The debate is already over: bitcoin is the first and final BOS of all digital assets.
It is the largest, most popular cryptocurrency – always has been, and always will be. Its dominance over the crypto market grows by the day, and the window of opportunity for any altcoin to unseat the orange king has long expired.
While other blockchains remain important, they are competing in a very different arena than they were ten years ago. Their goal is no longer to defeat Bitcoin, but to become its greatest ally; a complement that adds to and shares in its success.
BitcoinOS is spearheading the technology that has finalized the terms of this game, bringing both opportunity and peril in its wake. Divergent paths lie ahead for the world of crypto: either become a BOS and forever prosper under Bitcoin’s banner, or resist and be utterly destroyed.
Bitcoin: The Undisputed King
Bitcoin is a textbook example of a digital monopoly.
Launching in 2009, its first-mover advantage gave it a multiyear lead over altcoins to absorb users, investors, and global mindshare.
Notably, this headstart without any competitors allowed Bitcoin adoption to grow in a purely decentralized manner, without needing a founding team, company, or foundation to market the project. Altcoins today cannot hope to gain traction amongst a sea of competitors under such purist conditions.
This one-of-a-kind history gives Bitcoin unrivaled memetic power. The first digital currency that can’t be stopped, whose creator can’t be found, whose code is simple yet immutable. A ledger of seemingly transcendent origins whose currency cannot be created nor destroyed. Digital matter – the apex property of the human race.
Its beginnings also invite far less scrutiny from regulators, who are more willing to recognize BTC as a true digital commodity. This has made it far easier for businesses to offer services around BTC without as much red tape, including exchange services and exchange-traded products.
Being the leading digital monetary network means benefitting from network effects. More people are willing to buy and use BTC precisely because so many other people accept the asset. It's the most liquid market in crypto, and overwhelmingly more secure than all other proof-of-work blockchains.
Altogether, these factors have made bitcoin’s lead insurmountable. At a $1.3 trillion market capitalization, it comprises 60% of the entire crypto market. Its daily price movements wag the long tail of the entire crypto space, demonstrating what a gravity well it has on the entire space.
With over 100 million users, Bitcoin is the only digital asset universally recognized by the investment world. It’s also the only crypto being gobbled up by institutions, and which state and national governments are now eager to include in their treasuries.
History is now littered with examples of coins failing to outperform BTC for longer than one crypto cycle. Some of the most glaring cases include Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV). These are forks of Bitcoin’s code that their leaders tried to establish as the ‘true’ Bitcoin, but which are now worth less than 1% of Bitcoin’s value.
Even Ethereum is proving no exception to the rule. Its base asset, ETH, has consistently underperformed BTC since its intensely hyped Merge upgrade in 2022. Its value, denominated in BTC, peaked 7 years ago and has fallen 80% since. Now the market has moved on to other things, cycling onto other altcoin narratives while BTC proves to be the one digital commodity that investors stay with for the long haul.
In 2024, newly arrived TradFi investors show even more lopsided favoritism for BTC.
“For our clients, Bitcoin is overwhelmingly the number one priority,” said BlackRock’s Head of Digital Assets, Robert Mitchnick, two months after BlackRock launched its Bitcoin ETF. “And then a little bit ethereum, and very little everything else.”
There is one decentralized money that the world is flocking to, and it's called bitcoin. It is the undefeated, undisputed king of digital assets, and any who defy its might will be swiftly dominated.
The Magic Of Joining Team Orange
From the outside, Bitcoin is a terrifying opponent. Yet it’s also a globally inclusive technology and movement open to any who wish to join its ranks.
In fact, from the inside, Bitcoin seems to bring incredible prosperity to anyone who supports it instead of resisting it.
Take BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager. A giant of traditional, centralized finance, BlackRock and Bitcoin should in most ways be bitter enemies. In 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink derided Bitcoin as an “index for money laundering.”
However, after recognizing that Bitcoin was in high demand amongst its customers, BlackRock launched its Bitcoin spot ETF in January 2024, offering clients access to BTC investment within traditional investment and retirement accounts.
The result? IBIT had the most successful ETF debut of all time, hauling over 420,000 BTC ($29.2 billion) as of November 2024. As of June, the fund had accounted for 26% of BlackRock’s total inflows year-to-date. “I was pleasantly surprised, and would never have predicted it before we filed it, that we were gonna see this type of retail demand,” said Fink after the launch.
Then there’s MicroStrategy, the public company that’s famously gone all-in on BTC. A staunch Bitcoin maximalist, even Michael Saylor once attacked bitcoin in 2013, claiming that the asset’s “days are numbered” and that it was heading to zero.
But after realizing that his company was dying a slow death by keeping cash on its balance sheet, the firm decided to convert its core treasury to BTC, hoping to capitalize on the rampant inflation of the COVID-19 era.
Since becoming a champion of Bitcoin in August 2020, MicroStrategy’s share value has multiplied by over 15X. Not only is the company up several billions of dollars on its investment, but its embrace of BTC has become a viral marketing tool, and opened up new business avenues that the company never imagined were possible when it began.
The lesson here is twofold.
First, it's never too late to join Team Orange, even if you were an opponent or skeptic at first.
More importantly: the orange team is the winning team. Those who embrace Bitcoin get to share in its impressive spoils, outperforming those who don’t leap at the opportunity.
Obey The BOS; Become A BOS
BlackRock and MicroStrategy are shining examples from the TradFi world of what blockchains should be emulating in the crypto world. They each provided products that expanded investment access to BTC – the emerging standard of global, digital property.
For altcoins, the best pathway is to support Bitcoin in a way that TradFi can’t: to extend Bitcoin’s decentralized power. But what does that mean?
In general, the one area where bitcoin pales next to altcoins is on utility. You can send it, receive it, and hold it – but that’s it. Everything else – scalability, privacy, financial services, etc – reintroduces third-party intermediaries.
More advanced blockchains have spent several years innovating in these areas. Were these ecosystems to extend their services to BTC – the largest of all digital assets – they would suddenly be serving a capital base orders of magnitude larger than what they do now.
For 15 years, connecting Bitcoin to other blockchains in a truly trustless manner was impossible. But with the zero-knowledge technology introduced by BitcoinOS, that has now changed.
Several existing blockchains plan to integrate with BOS to transform from siloed crypto competitors into true extensions of Bitcoin – crypto’s main capital center. Pioneering BOSes including Cardano, Merlin, and B² Network will use Grail to move BTC into their ecosystem with cryptographic integrity for the first time, unlocking decentralized functionality for $1.3 trillion worth of long-dormant BTC.
For too long, altcoins have been building truly advanced financial technology while struggling to compete with Bitcoin for an actual capital base. BOS provides an opportunity for those chains to ride Bitcoin’s unstoppable momentum instead of fighting it, and bring their technology to the asset investors most desire to hold.
Altcoins that embrace this opportunity will be reinvigorated with new life, and carve themselves a pathway for long-term sustainability in a Bitcoin-centric world. Those who don’t will remain unplugged from BTC, and be steamrolled for daring to fight Bitcoin’s indomitable network effects.
Bitcoin is the BOS of all blockchains, and it's time to respect it. Sail with the wind, and swim with the tide. Don’t fight the BOS – become a BOS.
Don’t fight Bitcoin. Join Bitcoin.
