In this Q&A snippet, Andreas discusses the competition between bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, also looking at the historical possibility that the brand "bitcoin" is one of only a few things that survive radical change of the underlying technology.
Transcript
[AUDIENCE] There are about six hundred altcoins already. [The prices of] about one hundred of those altcoins have already gone to zero. [ANDREAS] Well, [their prices] didn't go to zero. They went to 0.000000015 of a bitcoin.
[Laughter] Someone still has them. [AUDIENCE] Yeah, but how do you know that bitcoin [will not end in the same way?] What is the difference between Bitcoin and Litecoin? Why do you prefer Bitcoin? [ANDREAS] [Bitcoin] did it first, did it best.
It has the absolute best development team... in the industry, the most intelligent scientists and software engineers, who are building amazing stuff. Every day, I can barely keep up. Just when I think that I am done reading for the day, somebody drops Segregated Witness or some other new innovation [on the mailing list].
I'm amazed [once] again. Here's the other important thing. People don't realize that Bitcoin today is not what Bitcoin was in 2009. It has the same name, 21 million coins, and more or less the same transaction structure.
But a lot of other things have changed quite dramatically. In scaling stories, sometimes the only thing that scales is the brand. I am 44 years old. Not a single cell in my body is one that I was born with.
They have all been replaced by now. All that remains is the pattern [of me], right? When I was in college, they said "Ethernet can't scale to one megabit," "can't scale beyond five megabits," "can't scale beyond ten megabit." Ethernet is a networking system, if you are not aware. I installed Ethernet with a coaxial cable as thick as my thumb and only 100 meters long.
It could only do five megabit. Today, all of the Local Area Networks (LANs) run on Ethernet, with ten gigabit over fibre. How much of that is really Ethernet? How much of that is just the word "Ethernet" attached to what we made it into?
It is a different distribution medium and architecture. The only things that are really the same: maybe the frame size and the brand. You must reconcile yourself with [the possibility that], in fifteen years, Bitcoin may [only retain]... three or four fundamental properties, such as the 21 million coin [limit].
[The coin limit] is not going away. If that were to go away, it is not Bitcoin anymore. Besides that, the brand name, and some [fundamental] characteristics, everything else may be revised. We will still call it "Bitcoin." I don't believe that we need to worry too much.
To me, altcoins are a very important part of the ecosystem. The more they experiment, the better. Something really important happened this year. People fled bitcoin into ether.
That was awesome. During all the previous times when they fled bitcoin, they left the cryptocurrency economy altogether. This time, they simply switched lanes. They did not abandon cryptocurrencies.
They left bitcoin and went into ether, to see what the other side is doing. "Look, they are not fighting!" Yet. "They are scaling!" For now. "It's all cozy and nice.
They have contracts and smart stuff." They also have humans. Human nature always prevails. Pretty soon, you will see some "interesting" things happen, like in Bitcoin. Bitcoin was fine, scaling was fine in 2012.
Nobody was arguing then. So the bottom line is... Now, we are keeping people in the cryptocurrency space. As people went into ether, [that] price went up, and then new people came in from the outside.
In order to buy ether, because [for some reason] they didn't believe in bitcoin, first they still used bitcoin as a medium of exchange to buy ether. So we will see how this goes. I am very optimistic.