There’s been plenty of of people claiming that the “flippening” is here and that it will happen soon.
For those who don’t know, the “flippening” is an event where another altcoin (in most cases ETH) has it’s market cap surpass Bitcoin’s and takes the #1 spot.
However, I don’t think that it will happen. Not to say that it couldn’t, but I just don’t think that the market is in a position to do so. I have 3 main reasons why I think that:
A) Scaling
One of the biggest problems that Bitcoin has is scaling, which makes it also the biggest reason people are predicting another coin to overtake Bitcoin.
However, that’s flawed logic. When the second coin starts being used as heavily as Bitcoin suddenly it’s not so cheap to transact with anymore. We’ve seen this to an extent with ETH already.
B) Adoption
I’ve heard that 30% of Bitcoin transactions are used in a purchase (the other 70% would be speculation related). There is also a growing (albeit still kind of small) number of merchants who accept Bitcoin. Not to mention most trades are performed with BTC (like BTC/LTC, BTC/XRP, etc).
Most coins simply don’t have that adoption level, and are really only backed by their tech & hype.
C) I just don’t think the market’s willing
Not that long ago ETH was climbing past 1K and Ripple was above 3$, creating two massive market caps and leaving Bitcoin’s dominance under 30%; the flippening looked plausible to me. Then the market crashed. Bitcoin’s value has returned, but the rest of the altcoins are still suffering (compared to their prices right before the crash) and Bitcoin’s dominance has been above 40%.
Conclusion
I just don’t think that anything is going to replace Bitcoin any time soon, and that if something starts to look like it might then it’s over-pumped and will probably dump soon. Of course I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
If you’ve didn’t know what the “flippening” was or if you weren’t sure about it, then perhaps you’ve found this post useful.